Meal Planning Revisited

I'm currently reading An Everlasting Meal, which makes it sound very romantic and enviable to simply start a pot of boiling water and then decide what to make for dinner. That approach is far from my reality (although I'm loving the book). In my life, it makes much more sense to plan out my meals for the week. A) I'm a planner, so having a plan tends to make me feel more comfortable. B) We're trying to save as much money as possible, so we only buy what we absolutely need at the grocery store, and C) I'm not the kind of person who enjoys spending much time thinking about cooking (I wish I were more like Meghan!). Cooking--for the most part--is a very practical endeavor in our household. We cook because it's cheaper and healthier. 

If I don't think about our meals in advance, I usually find myself pulling tried-and-true recipes out of my memory as I walk around the grocery store: pizza, vegetarian chili, tomato/mozzarella/basil sandwiches, and black bean and yam quesadillas. And while those recipes are delicious, they lose their deliciousness when they make an appearance week after week. Plus, it takes me longer to get through the grocery store because I inevitably forget some piece of produce and have to go all the way back to the beginning of the store.

So meal planning definitely makes sense for me, but I don't enjoy sitting down each week and taking time to find recipes and make a list. And although I love Meals for a Year, I want to be able to pull from recipes that have been vetted by our family. 

Here's my new plan: Create four different, seasonal meal plans that we rotate through three times every three months. It sounds more anal that it actually is. Basically, we would eat something different every day of September, but then we would repeat that month's plan in October and November before switching to the next season's plan. Each recipe would get eaten once a month for three months in a row. I originally read about this idea on Sew Liberated or Progressive Pioneer a couple years ago. 

It seems like the perfect plan for our family because once I set up the lists and recipes, Matt and I won't have to put much more thought into shopping and cooking. In the next couple years, our lives are likely going to crescendo into busy-ness. Hopefully we'll welcome another baby into our family and my school will open. We'll be balancing a lot with our own full-time work schedules and the lives of two children. We'll still want to cook dinner and sit down together as a family each night, but it would be great if we could minimize the amount of thinking and planning that has to go into that process. 

That doesn't mean all of our cooking with be mechanized or rote. We'll still try out new recipes when we're inspired to do so and bask in the joy of cooking. But our day-to-day process will be simpler, faster, and cheaper. 

I plan to set up our meal plans in the same way we set them up on Meals for a Year. I'll make a list of the recipes and create a separate shopping list for each week. This will be a fun project to take on as we patiently wait to add another baby to our family.

I also want to read this book about simplifying family meals. It looks really good!

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