Let’s face it, cooking at home can get boring. And why waste all that time slaving in the kitchen over some hum-drum meal that you won’t really enjoy when you can go out, relax, have a glass of wine, and enjoy great food cooked by someone else? I will tell you why! Because cooking at home is healthier for you and much cheaper. It is also a way to promote family bonding, teach your kids healthy eating habits, and give them a chance to learn how to cook on their own!
The key to keeping your weeknight meals fun, interesting, and yummy is meal planning. When you get home, brain dead after a long day of work and starving, the last thing you want to do is come up with what to eat for dinner and then actually cook it. If, however, you already have your meal planned and all the ingredients at hand, it takes all the stress and work out of cooking and makes it fun! You can come home and have dinner ready and on the table in thirty minutes, no sweat!
Here are my steps to successful meal planning:
1. Pick a day every week to do all of your meal planning, shopping, and meal prepping. I always do this on Sundays. Sundays is our lazy day when we usually do not have much planned. I take this opportunity to plan my meals, go to the grocery store, and prep my ingredients in the kitchen so that come the weekday, most of the dirty work is all done for me and I do not have to do any thinking come dinner time!
2. Use up what you have in the fridge and the pantry. When planning my meals I always make a list of the items I have in my fridge that need to be used up and use this as a starting point to deciding what to cook the following week. For example, right now I have some spinach and chives that need to be used up. So I go on the web and search for Recipe:Spinach and the first site that comes up is Simply Recipes Spinach. I could cook this one night with some orzo pasta and grilled fish. I could also make one of the spinach salads on this About.com page. One of my favorite uses for chives is in mashed potatoes so I might look online for a recipe or make one up myself.
3. Find out what fruits and vegetables are in season. You can do this by heading over to your local farmer’s market or if you are in the US, go over the NRDC website where you will find a list of in season fruits and vegetables by state and month. Not only will you be cooking with the freshest of fresh ingredients, you will also save money because these fruits and vegetables are usually the ones that will be on sale.
4. Choose a theme for each night. This makes meal planning a lot easier. There are so many great recipes out there and so many resources to find recipes that it can be a daunting task to only choose a few! By deciding on a theme for each night of the week you simplify that process and guarantee that you won’t get bored! This can be changed and adapted as the weeks go on and feel free to improvise! There are no set rules and so many different themes that you can come up with. Here is an example of what I mean:
Sunday: Mexican night
Monday: Asian stir-fry night
Tuesday: Pasta night
Wednesday: Grill night
Thursday: Breakfast for dinner night
Also, note that I do not plan a meal for EVERY night. I keep Friday and Saturday nights open so we can go out, order in, or eat leftovers!
5. Chose your recipes. I use a variety of resources to do this and follow a few guidelines.
Guidelines:
- It takes no more than forty-five minutes from start to finish, or some or all of the recipe can be done ahead of time.
- It uses ingredients that are convenient and readily available for me
- It is healthy- it contains vegetables, lean meat, whole grains, and only small portions of foods high in fat (cheese, oil, butter)
- If the recipe does not meet the above criteria it is easily adaptable to become all of the above
Recipe Sources:
- Google or Yahoo search- just enter Recipe:keyword where “keyword” can be anything to narrow down your search from a specific food item such as “spinach” to a theme such as “Mexican” or “breakfast”
- www.allrecipes.com
- www.cookinglight.com
- The Food Network
- Foodgawker and Tastespotting
- Food magazines such as Cooking Light, Gourmet, Food and Wine
- Cookbooks
Once you have chosen your recipes you can print them out. If you have a laptop you can do your part to save the environment by saving the recipes to a folder on your desktop called “This Weeks Recipes” and bring your laptop into the kitchen while cooking. Just be careful to keep the laptop away from the food and clean your hands before touching it!
6. Create a shopping list. Read through all of the ingredients in your recipes and write down all of the things you need that you don’t have. Make sure you write down how much you need as well so you don’t buy too much or too little! One thing to pay attention to when reading through the recipe and creating a shopping list is the amount of servings in the recipe. Make sure the recipe makes enough servings and if it doesn’t just scale up or down accordingly before creating your shopping list.
7. Go shopping!
8. Prep ahead! If there are any parts of the recipes that can be done ahead of time do it on your day off! If you are making a lasagna, this can be done ahead of time so that come dinner time all you have to do is pop it in the oven. Whole grains and soups can also be made ahead of time and stored in the fridge or freezer. If your meat needs to be marinated, do this ahead of time as well. It will save you a ton of time and energy come dinner time!
9. Enjoy a weeks worth of fresh, yummy, home cooked meals!
Great ideas! It’s always tough for me to figure out what to make for dinner. Hubs and kid always say, “I don’t know…” blah.
Love the new site!