We Have A Winner!

Congratulations, Holly Sisson! Cuisinart's gorgeous pressure cooker will soon be headed your way! That was fun - I'll have to do more giveaways.

I am so, so frazzled this morning. Frazzled and exhausted. We went to a family reunion this weekend - my paternal grandmother's relatives - and it was great, but now I feel like I spent the weekend running marathons every night instead of what really happened (eating a lot of buffet meals, meeting people and playing one frantic game of The Amazing Race.). Then we staggered home yesterday, completely worn. So we're sitting around the house, and I look at the clock and realize that it was 7 p.m. AND I HADN'T EVEN STARTED DINNER! Yikes!

Meals as rushed as last night's dinner ended up being, I'm here to tell you, are not very good.

I read TONS of comments from last weeks post about how people are really struggling to get healthy, high quality meals ready for their families on a daily basis. I remember when I first was a mother and dinnertime would roll around and I would get this sullen "I have to feed them AGAIN?" feeling - but that was before I discovered the Wonders of Meal Planning. Here's a little bit of my upcoming week, with some notes:

Tonight, we're having a roast chicken with lemon, mashed potatoes, some grilled vegetables and a spinach salad. I'm making a buttermilk cocoa cake for dessert, as well as a batch of frosted, gluten-free chocolate cupcakes (I'm going to freeze most of those to bring with us on a trip next weekend.). While I'm in the kitchen and the oven is on, I'm going to make a pan of granola.

The leftover chicken will become chicken salad sandwiches for my husband's lunch tomorrow. Tuesday's supper will use some medium-sized zucchini a friend gave us, which I'm going to stuff with a spaghetti sauce and ground beef (hamburger I bought on sale and froze. Whoo!) mixture and serve with a quick tomato and avocado salad. And then on Wednesday, I'm making an economical brown rice and spinach casserole for supper, which will DOUBTLESSLY result in endless complaining from everyone in my house. Wah wah, you freaking babies!

Okay. So that's a quick overview of our Gastronomical Week. Meal planning sounds kind of daunting when you first think about it - where will you find all that time to sit down and THINK of all this stuff? - but in reality, it's MUCH quicker than desperately trying to think of what to make at the end of each workday. I generally sit down on Friday evening for half an hour and sketch out our week, drawing up my grocery list at the same time. After the next morning's shopping, I am DONE thinking about what I have to make for the REST OF THE WEEK. Easy! 

How does your household handle meals during busy weeks? Are you struggling with meals, or does your family have a good handle on preparing healthy, tasty meals? Share your cooking strategies and advice here, as well as your favorite quick cooking books, magazines and websites, and I'll use it all in a big weekday cooking post next week.

Comments

[Kitchen Appliances]

Great blog, very interesting. We don't seem to have anywhere near as many family style blogs in the UK, I always seem to come across cooking blogs in the US...shame.

[bren j.]

Well you'll remember my feeling of ecstasy when I accomplished my goal of a meal plan for a whole month. It was a degree of prepared awesomeness the likes of which I had never felt before. We made it a game and I think it will be an even funner (?) game when we have more kids who are older. We each had to think of 15 meals, write them on slips of paper and put them in a jar. Then we took them all out, tossed the duplicates and made our meal plan. It took about 45 minutes but hey, I'm willing to sacrifice 45 on ONE Sunday for fretting 45 DAILY about what we're going to have for dinner, plus we wasted far less than we usually do. (We use allrecipes.com a lot!)

[Guinevere Meadow]

I'm very much a beginner at cooking and meal-planning, but here is what I do (at least, when I have not been doped up on pain meds from tooth removal, or been on vacation, or gone to help family during a medical emergency...so, I haven't done this ALL MONTH but I plan to resume.)

We've got a handful of "go-to" meals that easy to prepare and healthy. Each week I try to plan one pasta dinner, one chicken dinner, one beef dinner, and then one "new" thing, either something I find online, in my cookbooks, or the cooking magazine I subscribe to. As backups, we keep frozen hamburger patties and frozen pizzas on hand. Not as healthy, I know, but it's gotta be better than ordering a pizza or getting something super-greasy from a fast food joint!

Once I plan what I'm going to do, I write out the week's "menu" on a whiteboard in the kitchen. As I make them, I cross them off the list, so at a glance I can see what meals I can choose from for any given night.

[amreen]

with two toddlers and a new baby, my menu planning has been on hold. i'm trying to eat healthy which, however, does involve some thought. here's what i've come up with: we do a protein, carb and veggie every night plus a salad. pasta one night a week and one night take-out. when i do groceries, i buy steak/chicken/fish, loads of veggies and potatoes/yams/brown rice/grilled pita make up the carbs. i combine them as i please just before dinner time. it's kind of boring but it works for now.

[Rosebud & Papoosie Girl]

I am not very good at meal planning yet, but thanks to you I now trying much harder! I think of our weeks worth of dinners when I shop and generally stick to it. My favourite trick is to make more of stuff and freeze some, especially meat sauce. It has many uses in my house.

[LoriD]

EVERY week is a busy week, or so it seems. I don't really meal plan, except that I always have enough salad ingredients for the week, as well some staples like canned tomatoes and beans, pasta sauce and eggs. If the kids ask for something specific, I'll make sure I grab those ingredients. We generally avoid frozen foods (except cheese tortellini and frozen fish). We're always a little 'seat of our pants', but seem to eat well in spite of ourselves!

[nomotherearth]

I didn't win?? Boo.

We have no strategy, and that's probably why we struggle. We do keep a list on the fridge so that when we run out of something, we just jot it down. We're a buncha geniuses, I tell ya.

[Woman in a window]

Seat of our pants...from the popular "Seat of our Pants Cult of Figure it out At the Last Minute Group of Last Minuters..." Get the point?

[Aliki]

We're embarking on the menu planning thing--we're both inspired to make it happen, even if it's depressing because half our house usually doesn't LIKE what we make.

[Heidi @ggip]

During a very busy week, we would have to pull something from the freezer (already prepared) or get fast food. Might not be "super" mom, but it is realistic.

[Barbie]

I've created a staple grocery list and then I added 5 meals to that staple list. Once that was done I did it 6 more times(repeating a few meals here and there). Now I have 6 weeks of meals that we like (most of us at least, I have some of those babies you talked about:)that I just type off of my computer, look through my kitchen and cross off what I have and go.

It took a lot of time to create, but has been so worth it in saving my time on a weekly basis. I also have a very good idea of what I make since I just repeat the same 20 meals each month. This helps me at the store when I see something on sale that I could use for another weeks meal.

[Omaha Mama]

I like to menu plan and sometimes post them and play along at orgjunkie.com's Menu Plan Monday. I do agree - menu planning is a huge help. I even did a whole month of planned suppers in June which worked great. My issue right now is the inspiration. Food, blech. Cooking, blah. Which always ends up with me in a drive-through somewhere.

[Megan (FriedOkra)]

My planning during normal weeks works like yours does. Plan, shop, done, no worries. I've also saved menu plans from weeks that got rave reviews so I can lean on those when I'm not inspired. I love to try and incorporate the season's best offerings in my plans - that's sortof my overall approach to cooking in general. (Like your zucchini, for example). If a particular day or days in a week look like they're getting out of hand, I pick crockpot or cook-ahead meals for those nights. I also try to keep a few entrees in the freezer for the really YIKES days. Like these days, for example.

[Kathryn]

I have a regular rotation of meals. I add in some new stuff every once in a while. I do a rough draft of what we will have for dinner for the week so that when I go shopping on Monday morning (ick. that's today) I can get what I need.

[Jen Maier]

We are so bad at meal planning! Life is rushed and we tend to eat simple dinners the majority of the time - bbq, eggs, wraps, etc. but no one complains and simple can still be yummy and nutritious!

[Anita Jo]

We just recently started menu planning in earnest in our house. I resisted it for years for some reason. My husband and I do it together since he does most of the cooking, and I make the grocery list at the same time. And I have to say, I don't think it takes any longer to make the grocery list than it did before, but it makes life SOOO much easier. And we save money at the store. And we eat better. Woo-hoo! I'm hooked!

[Kyla]

We are terrible at this. Even when we do sit down and plan meals, when the time rolls around to cook and eat them, one of us no longer finds it appealing. We are finicky children when it comes to making and eating a meal. Sigh.

[Becky]

I have been planning meals just as you do for 27 1/2 years. It makes things easy.

But ... as of late ... I have FINALLY realized that my disgust for shopping is helped when I plan for 2 weeks at a time instead of one.

I still need to stop by for fresh fruit and fresh veggies and the ocassional forgotten tidbit, but for the most part, I get a reprieve from the store every other week.

Yay! Planning ahead is a good thing.

[Janet]

I tend to meal plan more in the winter. It is awesome, I just get lazy in the summer with the ease of grilling and abundance of fresh vegetables.

How do you stuff zucchini? I assume that you cut it in half, hollow out, stuff with filling and bake? My garden will soon birth an abundance of the versatile green squash and I need fresh ideas for using it up.

[Mom24]

Oh my gosh do we struggle! I meal plan, and I put a lot of time and effort into it, but some weeks real life comes along and BOOM! the meal plan goes right out the window! I'm going to work harder at it though. It's too expensive and nutritionally bankrupt to go out.

[Julie Bo Boolie]

I meal plan as well else all would be lost. I try to figure out 7 suppers and a few lunches (Gunther almost always has leftovers for lunch but sometimes we actually polish supper off so I need to make him a sandwich so it's always good to have something for that on hand).
Generally I find that I can't actually stick to which meal on which day but so long as I know I have the ingredients on hand and have a list of potential meals to choose from I'm ok and panic is kept at bay.