Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Simple Meals (or meal-planning redefined)

One thing I've struggled with constantly since getting married is planning meals. We both work right now (more or less...) and have little time in the evenings to prepare a nice dinner. We also both usually take our lunches (unless we can make it home for lunch) which creates a little rush in the morning. Meal planning, while time consuming, has overall saved us much time, headache, and money, but especially since J returned, why couldn't we "keep up" with our meal plan?

Solution: Simplify our meals from Monday - Thursday! It sounds so obvious, but agreeing on this was rather freeing. J is perfectly content to eat simple weekday meals (really, he'd eat about anything!) and I don't have to cut my work short every day to try to have dinner ready.

We need to think of some healthier options, because it seems like most of our "simple" meals aren't the best for us, but this is a start.  A few ideas are grilled foods, salads, bulk cooking on the weekends then pulling portions out during the week. I know a lot of people try weekend cooking, but our weekends tend to be pretty busy around here, so we can't completely rely on that.

We're also attempting to plan our meals on Sunday afternoons/evenings, allowing me to grocery shop first thing Monday morning. (Which, while I "work", I'm in grad school and have some flexibility at least.)

Look for menu plans to be here again soon, and any simple weeknight meal ideas are welcome as we try planning meals with this mindset!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I plan my meals on Sunday, too. Hope it works for you! I know that when I don't have to think about what to cook, it sure takes some stress out of my life.

emw said...

yay! so glad you're back in the blogging world! my idea for simple suppers is to do a taco/burrito/quesadilla night. You can prep ingredients early, use leftovers for lunches or have tacos one night, eat breakfast the next night and then have burittos the next night with the same leftover ingredients. or if you're like us you can just eat mexican for three nights straight (lunches too) until it's all gone!