I remember when I was single...I'd have things for dinner like goat cheese, brie, crackers, and peppered salami...at 10pm at night....with a beer. One of my greatest fears before having kids was that my kids would starve, since I am not known for following a schedule with precision. I remember thinking, "Wow, I'll have to PLAN dinner and have it ready at a certain TIME?! And have VEGETABLES?!" The girls are two now, and dinner is at 5:30pm, maybe 6pm at the latest, and it actually seems easy compared to mixing formula non-stop or pureeing veggies, and the schedule itself has eased up as well from the newborn days. We've been making an effort to eat at home more to save money and to eat more healthily, but I've discovered unless I have a meal plan in place, suddenly it's my nightmare come true--it's 4:30pm and I have no idea what's for dinner, and everything is frozen solid. (Actually, my nightmare is that it's 10pm and I realize the kids are not only still awake, but starving and screaming. Actually, any one of those three things at 10pm is pretty much a nightmare.)
I've been doing here and there, kind of casual meal planning for a few months now. I dove headfirst into a ton of get-it-on-the-table-quick-and-cheap-and-organic-from-our-freezer-and-basement-stockpile-that-I-bought-solely-with-coupons-and-grew-with-my-own-hands kinds of books and was--of course--overwhelmed. So I picked a few things out that made sense and started there.
- Plan meals for a week or more at a time
- Make a list from those recipes
- Stockpile if on sale and you have coupons
- Make certain parts of the meal ahead (if you are baking chicken tonight, cook an extra piece for tomorrow's jambalaya and you're 20 minutes ahead of the game
- Choose recipes that are easy and use ingredients you usually have on hand
