Frantic Home Cook – Home cooking, Recipes, Healthy, Frugal

OK, I’ll address this to moms because, sadly (or happily, depending on your view), we are still primarily the ones at 5:00 pm fielding more questions than William Shatner at a Star Trek convention.  Seriously, how many times a week do you hear any of the following?

• What’s for dinner?
• What can I eat?
• Are we eating that AGAIN?!
  
• When will dinner be ready?
• Why does the dog have a peanut butter jar stuck on his head again? (OK, maybe not that last one at your house, but at OUR house…oh, sorry, off track.)

Really, when you look at what we home cooks do on a weekly basis, a good deal of it is spent figuring out what to have for dinner, when to shop for stuff to make dinner, how long it will take to make dinner and whether our family will actually EAT the dinner without an orchestra of whiny, gagging noises.

So while I’ve read many great books on how to simplify your life, the best thing I’ve done to make my life easier is to make a weekly menu. Now before you going saying that you don’t have time, realize that you don’t have time NOT to have time. (Wait. What?? You know what I mean.)

You can make a menu plan from the most basic to the most advanced, depending on your commitment level. Here is the Frantic Home Cook’s Guide to Menu Planning for Everyone.

• Super duper easy (aka I’m really lazy)
  Pick one night a week to serve the same thing that your family loves. Make it pizza, spaghetti, tacos, stir fry or pancakes.
• Still pretty easy (aka I won’t admit that I’m lazy)
  Pretty much the same plan as above but you assign nights of the week to your favorite types of food. Rotate your three favorite Mexican dishes every Monday. On Tuesday, switch out a couple different fish dishes. On Wednesdays, make up some kind of stir fry. You get the idea. Alternatively, you can use menus already laid out by one of the many on the web:
  • I’m an Organizing Junkie
  • Menus for Moms

The key here is PRINT out or write down the menu. Believe me, even if your cupboards are full of tasty ingredients for all the meals, you will forget what you were making in the 5:55pm vortex of “Where is my homework?-Honey, I’ll be late-Why does the dog have a peanut butter jar stuck on her head again?”

• A little more effort (aka I’m not allergic to lists)
  Write out menu cards for four different weeks. Write down the ingredients necessary to make all of the dishes on the back of the card and take that card shopping with you every week. Pin the card on the fridge. On days when you feel like Emeril Lagasse, veer away from the list. No harm, no foul.
• Martha Stewart (aka I always know what I’m having for dinner every night.)
  You’re for real? You mean, you really exist? I thought you were some mythical creature like Bigfoot.

In our next post, we’ll talk more about planning and how it can save you money and sanity. For those days when the dog has a peanut butter jar stuck on her head.

Blessings and health.