MEAL PLAN
Daily snack options: carrot sticks, grapefruit, dried mulberries, toasted pumpkin seeds, banana bread (for hubby)
Dessert possibility: Sharlyn melon-prickly pear sorbet
Monday
- Breakfast: Leftover pancakes with syrup; whole wheat toast with pumpkin butter
- My Lunch: Noodles with leftover stirfry vegetables
- Hubby's Lunch: Leftover rice & stirfry vegetables
- Dinner: Leftover bibim bap, dessert wine
Tuesday
- Breakfast: Whole wheat toast with marmalade
- Lunch: Rice with Indian chard topped with minced preserved lemons
- Dinner: Barley-vegetable soup (including pickled purslane), rye toast, roasted beet-orange-arugula salad
Wednesday
- Breakfast: Raisin or banana bread
- My Lunch: Salad with pickled purslane & toasted pumpkin seeds, rye toast
- Hubby's Lunch: Leftover soup
- Dinner: Yaki soba – soba noodles with onion, carrots, cabbage, and I’itoi onions
Thursday
- Breakfast: Raisin or banana bread
- My Lunch: Leftover yakisoba
- Hubby's Lunch: Rice with salsa
- Dinner: Rice with curried carrots, cabbage, & sweet lemon pickles
In planning the menu, I carefully considered what perishable produce needed to be used first, meal portions, and leftovers. But I already encountered problems with the plan last night.
I have tried meal planning periodically and always seem to have problems with it. A common one is for me to sit down, plan out the whole week's meals, and then absolutely not want to make what is scheduled. For a while, I tried just figuring out the dishes for the week with the option of mixing and matching to make them on the days we wanted them. That worked better but I still often wanted to make something else entirely - still using the ingredients on hand but in different combinations. Mess up one meal's plan and it throws off the others, meaning I was back to figuring out a new plan or going day by day.
My next attempt was to sit down each evening and figure out the next day's meals only. This worked pretty well as it built in a lot of flexibility to use leftovers or anything that urgently needed to be cooked as well as letting me change my mind for meals throughout the week. Then I started getting more and more busy and this planning shifted to the next morning. On a busy morning, I'd blow it off, and eventually drop the planning altogether. The saving grace about many vegetarian meals is that they can be thrown together at the last minute without a great deal of planning. Heck, even dry beans can be cooked in less than an hour using a pressure cooker.
One of my biggest problems with meal planning, though, is the one I ran into last night: miscalculation. The plan was to finish up the bibim bap. However, I wasn't terribly hungry last night so I didn't finish my portion. This isn't a dish that freezes well, but the meal plan for today didn't leave space for shifting my lunch. The other miscalculation was that I wasn't up to cooking the next day's lunch late in the evening. (It was a long day and I was worn out.)
Something had to change in the plan. I decided to cook rice this morning - on the plan anyway - and mix some with the leftover bibim bap, sending it to work with my sweetie instead of the Indian greens. For my lunch, I'd eat the leftover salad I missed in the inventory, leftover rice, and do a quick saute on the radishes. Tonight, I can add the chard to the soup instead of making Indian greens and my sweetie can have the last piece of cornbread (also missed in the inventory) with it instead of rye bread.
Sounds like a plan, right? Well....now the problem is the soup is going to make far more than 3 servings (dinner tonight plus my sweetie's lunch tomorrow).
In fact, this picture shows just the chopped stems from the garden chard - about a quart's worth! (They are in water to keep the cut edges from browning.)And, there's more rice than I need for lunch today. So, more re-figuring is necessary or I'll be throwing leftover soup and/or rice in the freezer for the weekend. Hey, that's not a bad idea. We always are strapped for time to prepare lunches on the weekend so soup would be really handy.
Problems are all solved now, right? Wrong. On my toast this morning, I planned to have marmalade. There are two kinds of marmalade open in the refrigerator: tangerine and limequat. I don't like the smell of tangerine peels so I pulled out the limequat. Ick! The smell and taste of lime is overwhelming for a marmalade. This is not a good toast topping, so I used pumpkin butter instead.
Now, though, I have to figure out how I can use this tart lime-y marmalade. I think it would work in my Pad Thai recipe to replace lime zest, lime juice, and some of the brown sugar. It might also work in a sweet and sour sauce. I need more ideas for using it in savory dishes. Toss me some suggestions! (No meat dishes, please.)
And, please, also share your tips for successful meal planning. I, obviously, have not got this figured out yet.
Actually, I think I would do far better with meal planning in a food scarcity situation than in one where too much fresh food may spoil if not used as scheduled. I am really good at stretching food. Is freezing, dehydrating, and canning on a very small - and almost daily - scale the answer? Or is my plan to move to an area where there is not year-round farming going to solve this problem for me since I'll have to preserve more during the abundant growing season and eat from stored food during the winter?
6 comments:
I'm not very good at meal planning, mostly for one of the reasons you stated, I often don't feel like eating that meal when the time comes. I'm also really tired when I get home and sometimes just don't bother to cook. Or I list a bunch of things I want to make, but it feels like I am always running out to buy more food. I need to focus more on making things in batches to freeze, which I guess means I have to stop sleeping in on weekends.
I've been stressed about meal planning lately, too. I just posted about it yesterday.
Like you mentioned, I hate to follow the schedule and instead like to cook what I want when I want it. If meal planning adds to my stress, I'm just going to abandon it, since we live in a climate where food preservation is important, and this time of year I just don't buy produce from the store (non-local) that I know we won't need.
Most often, I don't make official recipes, I just cook some beans or lentils, a grain, and some veggies, and we use things like salad dressing, sauces, or chutneys to liven them up. We have a lime chutney that we often spoon over beans and rice type meals, or to give a little interest to a box veggie burger, and it sounds like your lime marmalade would be great on either of those, if you ever have anything so boring as that!
Since I work full time, meal planning works well for me. I just cook up a few recipes, and I rotate them throughout the week for hubby and myself. Flexibility for shifting moods is necessarily built in, in order to avoid excessive eating at restaurants.
As for the marmalades, I think they would make a nice glaze for stirfries or other veggies/rice/potatoes - thin out with some water and add some spice to vary the ethicity.
Maybe you could also add a teaspoon or so in the center of muffins, make a glaze for cakes, etc.
When I turned off the refrigerator last year I found out the hard way that my regular patterns brought way too much food into the house. What you described in your post happened to me constantly - but I didn't have the option of simply putting what was left into the freezer or refrigerator.
I now know that I really don't need so much food. Eureka. I had years of grocery shopping behavior to revise. If I was the sole harvester of our community garden, I would have to preserve food like crazy and maybe even sell or trade some.
And, now that I am considering foraging, it is even less vital to stock up for a big pantry.
Planning fail - I'm looking at some bok choi plants that should have been used about three weeks back. Now I can't use them because the caterpillars beat me to it. (These are the ones in my window boxes.) I should plan more but never seem to get round to it.
And I still have 4 bags of apples to deal with!!! (I picked that last tree.) It has been an incredible apple season this year.
viv in nz
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