#not cabbage

Meal Planning

Today I'm taking a break from cabbage to discuss another decidedly un-sexy topic: meal planning.

I really like it when Dave, Bear, and I all eat dinner together.* But having dinner together before Bear's bedtime leaves little to no room for error. You just cannot fuck around if you work full time, have a kid in daycare, and are trying to get a real dinner made and on the table by 6 pm.

The thing is, my pre-baby dinner routine involved a LOT of fucking around. Paging through cookbooks, changing my mind about recipes, picking up an extra ingredient at the store, listening to NPR, having some wine, noodling over whether to make a salad. I enjoyed it a lot but it was the definition of inefficient.

It's taken a while to adjust to the new mealtime regime, and while there's lots of advice about weeknight dinners/dinner with kids,** the key for me is meal planning. More than prepping vegetables in advance, or using the rice cooker, or keeping frozen fish fillets around. I can mostly get it done if I have a very clear plan, and mostly cannot if I don't.

So, in the hope that this might help others who are struggling with getting meals together quickly, here's what meal planning looks like for me:

Choosing Recipes and Shopping

We go grocery shopping on Saturday or Sunday. So before we go, I flip through cookbooks and magazines and dig up the recipes I noticed online over the past week and make notes of things that look appealing. I aim for around 4 - 5 meals. If I plan for more meals, we end up with too much food leftover or I lose focus. If I plan for fewer we end up needing to go grocery shopping in the middle of the week. Here are some things I think about:

Ingredient lists. At least one or two recipes should have ingredients that won't go bad quickly.

Time. I look for things that will be doable in a fairly short amount of time, or at least that don't require a lot of hands-on time before we eat.

Complete-ish meals. So possibly a hearty vegetable soup, or something like the Middle Eastern Lentils that involve rice and vegetables and yogurt, or a vegetable plus a protein. This can be mixed and matched a bit, but the aim is to avoid eight different vegetable side dishes and no meal.

Backup recipes. In case the grocery store doesn't carry a particular spice that's important, or they don't have a certain fish, or some of the produce doesn't look great, I come up with alternatives that I can swap out while in the store.

Then I make a grocery list, and double-check ingredients that we might or might not have. If I have backup recipes, I'll put the ingredients for those together so I know not to buy, say, cilantro if I don't get the black cod.

Here's a picture of the grocery list from last week:

Staying Focused

Oh my god, this is the challenge. I write the recipes on a chalkboard that faces our kitchen island so they are literally staring me in the face. I try to start the week with the more elaborate recipes so by the time I get to Wednesday or Thursday I can coast a little. I also try to remember to make the dishes with ingredients that spoil first. When I am really on my game, I add meal ideas that rely just on pantry staples to the list so I have some backups.

And in case you were wondering, Dave does all the clean up.

* As opposed to pulling something simple together for Bear and making a grown-up dinner for after his bedtime. Also, I don't want to imply that because dinner together is important to me that it needs to be important to you. You know all that research about how dinner together is so good for kids? Apparently the key is the time together, not the actual eating of dinner.

You know

I swear Adachi's got the watermelon

Not a cabbage