For starters, I should apologize for my apparent ADD. For real, someone needs to put some adderall in my coffee or something. I wrote this post at like ten in the morning on Thursday. And then it was oooh! I should clean! And then ooh, dinner. Oh, Lost Girl! Bonfire! Ancestry.com! Shiny!!!
And now it's 2 in the morning on Friday and I'm just finishing/posting this. So if the timeline is a bit off... That's why.
I should mention something else I did yesterday. It's something I do twice a month, and it's a pretty time consuming event when it happens. However, it makes my life a lot easier than it would be without it: I menu plan like a boss.
Let me explain my relationship with food. I come from a family of bad-ass female cooks. My mom and my Aunt Carole are
amazing in the kitchen, and I can only hope to someday be as awesome as they are. My grandmother, not so much. She cooked with marshmallow fluff. But my mom and her sister learned from
her mom, who was also a bad-ass cook. (We're really not sure what happened with Grandma.) We still have recipes of hers that we use, and that my children will probably use, and their children too, because my kids will damn well know how to cook.
But anyways, I started learning to cook with my mom when I was pretty young. It's an integral part of who I am. Some people, when they're sad, or upset, or just plain bored, like to clean (a trait I will never understand). My mom's best friend Kathi is one of these people. It takes all kinds, right? But some people watch trashy TV, or stuff themselves with chocolates. Some people who are clearly much healthier than I will go for a run or a swim or work it off at the gym. (Honest to God that wasn't supposed to rhyme.) But me? I cook.
When my Grandmother died, I made six batches of muffins. When my cat died, I made three cakes, some muffins, a pan of lemon bars and a pot of chili. When my husband was in Iraq, I took baked goods to work with me just about every week. Cooking is just how I deal with things. But it's also something I enjoy doing on a regular basis, because I really love to eat good food.
However, my husband and I are on a budget. So I can't always cook like I want to. Thus, my menu planning scheme was born. These are the tools I use to do it:
It looks a lot scarier than it is, I promise.
The pink notebook is my Kitchen Bible. In it, I have written down every dinner meal I know how to make. This includes a main entree, and usually one or two sides. I write down meals like this, and not just individual foods, so that I never have to screw around with "Okay, so we're having chicken piccata... what should I make with it?" because it's right there. Rice and spinach go with chicken piccata. Duh.
The black and swirly colors binder is where all my typed recipes are. Not going to lie, most of them come straight from my mother's recipe box. The calendar is out because I write the dinner menu on it for every day, and also so I can keep track of how many meals I need to make before the next payday. The computer is open for Pinterest (again, duh). The paper on the left is all the meals Jimmy and I have chosen for these next two weeks, and the paper on the right is the start of a grocery list. The only thing not pictured there is this app:
This app is amazing. If you have a iPhone and love to make lists, stop reading and go download it right now. I'll wait.
This is another view of the same app. In the free version, you can have up to four lists (including your pantry inventory), and you have access to all the coupons you could ever possibly want, and then a few hundred more.
Anyways, here's how it goes.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are "box meal" days (what Jimmy calls Hamburger
Helper), in order to stay on budget. Saturdays are Crock Pot days, for
two reasons. One, because I have an almost unhealthy obsession with my crock pot, and two, because I like
Saturdays to be lazy, and how much lazier can you get than a crock pot?
Then, the Friday after payday is our Takeout Day, and then one random
day in the pay period is a Jimmy Cooks day, which usually includes
something on the George Foreman.
So, of the fifteen or so days between paydays, eight of them are already accounted for. Then a few days before payday, Jimmy and I sit down and go through the Kitchen Bible. We pick out what meals we want for those eight days, we choose the two crock pot meals, and Jimmy decides what he wants to cook.
Here ends Jimmy's involvement with the whole process.
After this, I sit down and figure out what meals go on what days. After some arranging and rearranging, I put them on the calendar. I also write a list that includes sides and where the recipe can be found (Pinterest, saved to my e-mail, in my recipe book, or in a cookbook), and keep that in the front of the Kitchen Bible.
Then I go through every recipe and make a grocery list of what we'll need for each meal that we don't already have. I do this by hand on a sheet of paper. Totally the dark ages, I know, but it helps me consolidate if I need to. Otherwise I end up with "chicken breasts, 2 pounds" on the list in List Ease twice, and I don't know whether I need two pounds and entered it twice, or I really need four pounds.
Anyways, once I have all that written out, I add it to the grocery list in my phone that has been accumulating since about five minutes after we got home from the commissary the last time. (In case anyone doesn't know, the commissary is the grocery store on any Army post. I don't know why they can't just call it the grocery store. Probably because it's the Army and they have to have a super-special name for EVERYTHING. But whatever.)
After that's done, my life is fairly simple. Every morning, I look at the calendar and see what's on the menu, and I can be confident that I won't have to send Jimmy for beef broth right in the middle of making dinner because I just discovered we don't have any. I don't ever have to think about "God, what do I make for dinner?" because I thought about it two weeks ago. So while it seems like a LOT of hassle while I'm doing it, it actually makes things way easier.
And later today, when it's not two in the morning, I'll post about what I actually did on Thursday. For now, I'm overdue for a date with my pillow.
I promise I'll be more coherent tomorrow. Maybe.
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