Meal Planning

Repost #4

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For the last couple of years, we've had random boxes of fruits and veggies - first, a summer with a CSA, and then a local company that delivered a box of stuff to the door every week.

It was a beautiful thing - cut my shopping time dramatically, mostly saved us money (the CSA not so much, but the service had great prices and we split our box with a friend), and it encouraged eating things that weren't typical staples around here.

Unfortunately, the delivery service is going out of business, which means that I have to figure out what to buy again, and buy the things we're going to eat for the week, rather than planning what to eat based on what shows up on the doorstep.

Which, given my limited shopping availability, means I really need to plan things out ahead of time.

And that's not a bad thing - we're debating kindergarten or a young 5's program for my son next year, and kindergarten here is an all day event. Since he is a really picky eater, I'll be packing his lunches daily I suspect, so getting on the planning bandwagon now is good practice.

One of our plans last year was a bigger freezer. It didn't happen (too much to do, not enough time), but it will have to be done soon to make this manageable in any reasonable sense.

So...every weekend I'll be writing up our meal plan for the week. I'm subscribed to a meal planning service, 5 Dinners in 1 Hour, and I'm going to be looking at how to use her system, which is sort of a once-a-week prep setup. I got the "clean eating" version, which is ideal for us, but not everything on her meal plans each week is something we'll eat, so I'm thinking I'll take some meals from a couple different weeks. Also, she depends a lot on frozen veggies, and that's going to be a hard switch for us, given our history recently of eating almost exclusively fresh veggies (not all - we got overloaded on corn on the cob, so we threw those in the freezer, and can now have lovely roasted corn year round).

So...here's to a new future of better planning (I hope).

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