Planning Meals

I don't know about you, but I used to never plan my meals. I was in school, running from class to homework to some event with friends. If you had asked me what I wanted to eat when I came home from the day, I wouldn't have known. A lot of evenings I just grabbed whatever was easiest, whatever I could make and eat in five minutes.

Now that I have someone to cook for and with, the investment of actual meals seems a little more reasonable. And since I hate eating the same thing every night, I decided to start planning our meals. Well, our dinners.

I think everyone has their own way of going about meal planning. Some people like to plan for a month at a time, others go to the store and plan in their head while they're there. I've settled on planning dinners once a week. I wait until the ads for the week are out, and I try to plan my meals around whatever's on sale. Try. At least, I look at what's on sale when I plan something else, that's progress, right?

So I hunker down at my computer, usually on a Tuesday night, and flip through the ads. They fan out from my chair in a semi-circle on the floor. I've noticed that the same old produce goes on sale week after week. When is broccoli not on sale? Okay, it's not always, but even if it's not on sale, it's usually pretty cheap. And we definitely don't want to eat broccoli every night of every week forever. Every once in a while something exciting will catch my eye, like acorn squash or brussels sprouts. I'm interested. Then I think: Is this something I can convince my husband to eat? Then it's back to looking through the ads.

When I've looked enough, sometimes a glance, sometimes a perusal, I get out the cookbooks and settle down to work.

I like to cook from cookbooks. I know lots of people get their recipes online, but I love to know the chef behind the recipes. I feel confident in the recipes of certain chefs. And, if I find I can trust them, I like to explore their recipes that take me beyond where I would ever have thought to go myself. So I open up a trusty cookbook, or more usually, the newest one that's caught my eye, and off I go. I page through it, I search the index, I mutter, I sigh, and at the end of it all, I have a list of recipes written on my Google calendar for the next seven days.

What makes planning dinners difficult is that I don't have the time to make most of the recipes that look intriguing. Instead, I sift through to find meals that are simple enough to make after an hour and a half commute, but look good enough to tempt me to put in the effort. On the days when the meals don't, we end up eating quesadillas or egg sandwiches, whichever we've had less recently. And we don't want to eat those too many days in a row!

Planning dinners is a lot of work, but it makes eating a lot more fun. And once I find a good cookbook, I run with it. Until I'm done. And then I'm off to find the next one . . .