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Meal Planning Day One!
Wow. So you guys want to know how I plan my meals? Me?!! The one who is a horrible cook? Alrighty then! Now I know what to blog about all week. This should be fun. As in let’s-make-fun-of-Brenda sort of fun. Ha ha! Bring it ON!
So uh. The above is my fancy plan. Do you like how Bug added her big “H” signature? She likes to contribute. Pretty much what I do is I have this pre-created sheet of things that I buy at the grocery store and off to the bottom right I have the days of the week listed and lines to write in. Before I finish up my grocery list and head off to the store, I quickly fill out those blanks and make sure I have all the ingredients. If I don’t I add them to my list. Sometimes I start on Monday, sometimes I start with Thursday. It doesn’t really have to be a set day, I just always shop for a week’s amount of food.
I’d love to shop every day and be that kind of cook who buys the freshest seasonal ingredients to inspire the day’s meals but I just can’t make that big of a time commitment. I don’t have time to shop every day. I’d also love to only shop once a month but then we’d have lots of nice vegetables for a week and the other three weeks we’d be living off canned goods and frozen food. I like fresh vegetables every day if I can manage it. Since vegetables don’t last much longer than a week for me, I shop for a week.
This is what my shopping list looks like. I created it ages ago before Bug was even born (back in the days when I had more free time, but I still think it’s worth making even if you are busy because once you make it, you can print it out until the end of time and save yourself lots of headaches). It’s not very fancy. I created it in Adobe InDesign and if any of you use that, I’d be happy to share that file with you. But it’s set up for my grocery store, which is Ralph’s, and catered to the things I buy so it probably won’t be all that helpful to you other than comparing and contrasting. Here’s a pdf for your snooping pleasure.
I made an illustrated one for you guys that asked for one but I don’t personally think it would work for me because I need those prompts to help me remember what I need to buy. But this can be a starting point. Try this out and let me know how it works.
After I’ve made my list and checked it twice, I head out of the house to go shop. Whatever you do, don’t forget your list! I do that all the time and then I royally fail. Maybe you have a photographic memory but I don’t. Good thing we have another market within walking distance that I can run off to if I need a missing ingredient. But it’s more expensive than my favorite grocery store and usually swarming with beach tourists.
Then we shop! With the list! Bug helps me all the time. I thought the little tiny cart would be a fading novelty but, no. She insists on pushing it every single time we visit. If they are out of small carts it’s a tragedy. The small cart is actually really helpful. It keeps her going in one direction (most of the time) and we get a lot of people remarking about what a good little shopper she is. She’s mostly learned the routine and isn’t throwing in every single green product she sees anymore.
This is what I bought this week (minus a few boxes of cookies for Toby the junk-food-aholic). No wonder I’m always broke. That’s a lot of food! I’ve tried to buy less and it never works. So this is what we consume. Sometimes I buy less meat but we were low since I have been out of town for two weeks.
This is this week’s plan:
Monday: Vegetable Pork Stir-fry and sticky rice
Tuesday: Meatballs in sour cream sauce with small red potatoes and a green salad
Wednesday: Green Enchiladas and a green salad
Thursday: *leftovers (or mac and cheese or ramen noodles with vegetables)
Friday: Roman Chicken with oven baked french fries and/or sweet potatoes and a green salad
Saturday: leftovers
Sunday: Lasagna and a green salad*Thursday was going to be sausage and rice but I somehow flubbed up and forgot to buy sausage. So the list doesn’t always work perfectly but that’s okay because most of these meals will create another meal’s worth of leftovers. I like leftovers. I know some people don’t but I do. They mean less time in the kitchen and more time on my laptop!
This is what we ate last night. It was yummy. Recipe after the jump.
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Operation Gingerbread!
At last my top-secret operation has been revealed! I like to call it “Operation Gingerbread.” Like all top-secret operations, it had phases. Three of them. Phase One was the cardboard-box version that I posted about over on Alpha+Mom. Phase Two was a real gingerbread-cookie house and Phase Three is still yet to be done but involves freezer paper, a t-shirt and a gingerbread man illustration shouting “Catch me if you can!” Stay tuned for Phase Three.
For Phase Two we brainstormed and did our research. We may or may not have gotten some inspiration from a Sur la Table catalogue and Mars (via Bug’s antennae). I LOVE gingerbread now. It’s so pretty, cute and delicious all at the same time! I almost love it as much as I love hedgehogs (which is huge). I have a feeling December’s banner may involve some gingerbread…
I might not have fallen so hard for gingerbread if I hadn’t stumbled across a giant display of this mix at my local grocery store. I don’t usually like to push products on this blog (and I’m not getting any kickback for this) but Krusteaz makes the best mixes!
I guess I’m a bit sentimental about Krusteaz because when I was in college (and starvingly poor) my dad got a job as a grocery broker representing Krusteaz. This meant he went around to all sorts of grocery stores to make sure their product was up to code and looked nice on the shelf. As a side benefit he got to take home the out-of-code boxes of pancake mix and brownies, etc. Sometimes my mom would send these out-of-code boxes to me in big care packages.
Let me tell you, there is nothing as delicious as FREE food when you are a starving college student. I was pretty much surviving on spaghetti noodles, ketchup and the stale biscotti from the break room at my job. Getting a box of cake and brownie mixes in the mail was like a gift from heaven back then. These mixes were especially great because most of the time all you needed to add was water. Perfect for a college student who has no cooking skills and not a thing in her refrigerator.
But I digress. I recommend this mix because it’s easy, it tastes good and it smells DIVINE!!! If you need a little kick to get in the holiday mood, bake a batch of these and next thing you know you’ll be sniffing the air and singing Christmas carols.
We had so much fun making and decorating the cookies that I made three batches of them. One with Jen and her family, one with my nieces and then one with the kids I babysit. It’s super-easy and always a crowd pleaser.
Making the house, however, was a bit more challenging. I’ve never tried it without a mix but it was plenty hard (for me) with the mix. I’m sure JustJenn would disagree but then she’s a baker AND an architect—which is not really fair in my opinion. My first problem was getting the walls and roof to harden enough to build with. I thought I could finish Operation Gingerbread in one day but I was very wrong. It took THREE days (and several hours in the oven with just the pilot light on) for the gingerbread-cookie walls to harden completely.
Then when they did harden enough to be sturdy, the pieces weren’t perfectly square anymore. I think something happened in the various ovens I transferred them around to. When I put the walls together there were big gaps that had to be filled with copious amounts of gloopy sticky icing. And that icing! Could it be any stickier?!!! It sticks to everything! My clothes, the table I was working on, the floor, my fingers…it was a mess. Of course it didn’t stick when I was using it to glue a heavy star candy to the side of a wall for decoration. No, then it slipped down and left a big track mark of white paste. I guess it wasn’t all that bad. But I would definitely say that this project is best with older kids who can help and not with toddlers who like to not help.
My ten-year-old niece, Rapunzel, was a huge help. I don’t think I could have done it without her.
In the end, the little house turned out pretty cute. I covered up the icing glue tracks with slices of gumdrops. My niece added a curving pathway and candy corn fencing. Then we dusted everything with powdered sugar “snow” and called it a day. Enough sugar will heal all that ails, right? The kids loved it. After I took enough photos to prove that I really did complete the project, we gave the house to my Grandpa to display at the group home he lives in. I think the old folks will appreciate it a lot more than I did.
