Meal planning Friday

I love to cook!  I would spend all day in my kitchen dirtying every bowl, dish, piece of cutlery, pot, pan, baking sheet, etc. in the quest to make the perfect meal (I might have said this once or twice before).  Unfortunately when you are working full-time and still want to spend time with your children after you get home from work, the perfect meal is not attainable every night.  Often dinner would be the last thing on my mind, neither Little man's father nor I would remember to take something out of the freezer in the morning, and then neither one of us would feel like cooking - dinner turned into yet another point of contention between the two of us.  After 30 minutes or more of thinking about what to make I would come up with something, head to the refrigerator looking for an ingredient that I knew we had three days ago, only to find it had been consumed in a snack while waiting for dinner to cook yesterday.

I set to the old, faithful, search engine and typed in 'meal planning' hoping that someone, somewhere would at least point me in the right direction to get started.  Salvation came out of that search - there are women who blog about just this type of thing - I knew there was something I liked about the blogging community.  My clicks landed me at thebettermom.com.  In addition to her strong faith and empowering woman through that faith, she publishes bi-weekly, gluten-free meal plans.  Each meal plan is accompanied by the recipes to cook all the meals therein.  This meal planning thing was going to be easier than I thought!

Needless to say I didn't go home, empty my freezer, cabinets and refrigerator of all my food and start with a monumental grocery list - although that might have been fun.  I went home and discussed it with Little man's father - if I do the planning, will you at least cook something from the weekly menu on your nights to cook dinner?  With a few grumbles and groans, he agreed to give it a shot.  Saturday morning, I inventoried the major food groups finding out what we had in the house and started to list a few basic meals that could be made with those items.  Then I thought about how to use up the left-overs; the roast chicken would make a chicken/cheddar/rice casserole or chicken and biscuits.  I quickly had a list of six meals for the following week.  I made out my grocery list with any items I was missing for those meals and then I added in a seventh - try-something-new recipe and added any missing items to the grocery list.

Getting the shopping done was only half the battle, dinner still had to be prepared each night.  Well, my internet search also yielded some pretty great tips, including some on involving your children in meal prep and clean up.  When I was single, I got tired of spending a fortune on lunch everyday so I used to cook up two family-sized meals on Sunday and parcel them out into individual lunch size containers and put them in the freezer for lunches during the week.  By the third week I had a pretty good selection of meals to take with me to work.  Meal planning involves the same kind of commitment on one of your weekend days, but it is centered around prep for the week, not necessarily cooking a week's worth of meals on Sunday while football is playing the background.

This past weeks menu looked a little bit like this:

Saturday - Pesto Pasta w/Italian Sausage, salad, garlic bread
Sunday - Roast Chicken w/oven roasted vegetables
Monday - London broil, baked potato, vegetable of choice 
Tuesday - Chicken/cheddar/rice casserole, vegetable of choice (made ahead or frozen)
Wednesday - Beef stew w/ herb and cheese biscuits (crockpot meal)
Thursday - Ham/potato/bean skillet
Friday - Parmesan chicken fingers w/ herb and blue cheese quiche, salad
Saturday - Tuna casserole, vegetable of choice (made ahead or frozen)

Sunday I made a double batch of cream of celery soup - 1/2 went into the tuna casserole which I made the same day and put into the freezer and half was put into the refrigerator for the chicken/cheddar/rice casserole.  Beef for the stew was cut up out of the roast that I bought at the grocery store and put in a separate storage bag in the freezer.  Carrots, onions, peppers, and tomatoes were cut up and placed in a covered bowl for Wednesday's stew. 

When meat is brought home from the grocery store, we now try to marinate it right away and freeze them with their sauce.  As the meat thaws it soaks up some great flavor.  Little man's father needed only wash a few potatoes and put them in the oven while finishing up chores or playing with Little man.  The meat and vegetables were started at the same time and in less than 20 minutes, a hearty, delicious and not terribly unhealthy meal was had by all .  While we were eating dinner, the rice was cooked for Tuesday's casserole.

After dinner on Tuesday, the meat for the stew was browned and added to the crockpot with the vegetables and remaining stew ingredients.  Wednesday before leaving for work, the crockpot was started.  The Parmesan chicken fingers were frozen after I made a double batch a couple of Sundays ago so we would have a quick meal option.  Quiche's can be baked ahead of time, frozen and reheated, unfortunately this didn't happen this week so the side dish for tonight's dinner will change on the fly.  Saturday, I try to have a quick and easy meal since I am usually running around trying to accomplish an entire weeks worth of chores in one day.

In the three weeks since we started planning meals for the week,  Little man's father and I haven't argued about dinner once, I have managed to follow the sales, stock up on local produce and meats when possible and have dropped my weekly grocery budget to right around $100.  This includes diapers, cleaning supplies, garbage bags, laundry detergent, etc.  This week's grocery shopping and meal planning has been sidelined by a trip to my mother's to check on an electrical problem, but tomorrow morning I will start anew.