In the Fall of 2006, when Dean and I first started dating I invited him over to my house one evening for dinner. Prior to this, we had always either gone out or he had cooked for me, so this was the first time my boyfriend would experience my cooking. Of course, being a typical girl, I frantically called my mother in search of the perfect recipe and meal plan. My mom, a better cook than I could ever hope to be, rattled off what I would be making that night: spinach salad, slices of tomatoes and mozzarella marinated in basil & olive oil, fresh fettuccini, and my great-grandmother’s recipe for Sicilian baked chicken.
That evening Dean cleaned his plate as he raved about the delicious meal, especially the chicken. The recipe was a definite “keeper.” Little did he know, he would someday eat those words…
Once Andrew was born in 2008, the separation of duties in our home went under somewhat of a transformation. As I was now the parent at home, I took primary responsibility for meal preparation. In theory, this was not a big deal - I had all day at home with “only” a baby to take care of, so having dinner on the table when my husband walked through the door certainly sounded like a reasonable goal. I quickly learned that this was one area of housewife-ing that I would really struggle with.
As most mothers know, describing a day at home with a young child as “busy” is the understatement of all understatements. Rather than spending my days sitting in a rocking chair rocking my newborn and reading him stories, my days were a whirlwind of cooking, cleaning, laundry, feeding, bathing, changing – and the list went on and on and on. Somehow each day, 4:30 crept up on me and I would quickly scour my recipe books looking for a dinner idea to pop out at me. And each day, I would sigh and pull chicken out of the freezer to begin preparing Dean’s “favorite” baked chicken.
Of course my wonderfully sweet husband never said a word. Instead, each night he smiled enthusiastically at his plate of baked chicken just as he'd donethe first night he’d eaten it. Yes, he was a keeper, but in my heart I knew our nightly ritual of baked chicken had to go.
And so began my quest for uncovering the meal-planning technique that would work for me. I tried everything, but no matter what I did I found I was either: a) spending an incredible amount of money on groceries, b) somehow always missing a key necessary ingredient, or c) having a very difficult time remembering what I had planned on cooking. Nothing was working for me and, to my mother’s dismay, baked chicken continued to make a nightly appearance at our dinner table…
And then, in January 2010 (yes my poor husband endured 1 ½ years of this), Crystal at Money Saving Mom, announced her Eat From the Pantry Challenge. Basically, the principal behind this is to take a hiatus from the grocery store for a month and, instead, find creative ways to prepare meals from the food already in your pantry. The only exception to this is a small weekly grocery budget for dairy and produce. My friends, M & W, and I decided to challenge ourselves to an abridged version of this, participating in our own Eat From the Pantry Challenge from January 15-31. As I do my grocery shopping on Wednesdays, my challenge ended up ranging from January 13th through February 3rd.
So during the second week of January, I once again scoured my recipe books and, of course, turned to the cooking expert (my mom) in hopes of creating a menu plan that would sustain my family for three weeks. I honestly imagined our dinners would quickly evolve into an alternating routine of pancakes and grilled cheese for dinner, quietly worrying about how I would get my little boy the nutrition he needed. Instead, as I took inventory of our pantry and freezer, three weeks worth of recipes somehow fell into place.
Each night’s meal plan was written on a dry-erase calendar and hung in our kitchen; and every morning I would consult the calendar immediately after breakfast. Meats would be taken out to thaw, crock pots would be filled, and casseroles would be carefully assembled. Suddenly, I was making the day’s most complicated meal in the mornings when I was full of energy. No longer did dinner time catch me off guard, but instead my family was sitting down to dinner at a reasonable time, eating well-rounded, carefully planned meals full of various meats, grains and vegetables. This was wonderful!
January’s Eat From The Pantry Challenge was such a success that I decided to implement some of the lessons I’d learned into my family’s everyday lifestyle. At the end of January, I created a meal plan for the entire month of February. Just as I’d done in the prior month, each night’s meal was labeled on my calendar and hung in the kitchen.
I came up with somewhat of a pattern that assisted me in planning meals a month in advance:
• Sundays have traditionally been “comfort food” days in our house, so these days now alternate between meatloaf (one of my all-time favorite foods!) and burgers (a favorite of Dean who lives to grill!) .
• Monday is Dean’s night in the kitchen. As he is our designated pork chef, each Monday we enjoy a pork dish of his choice.
• Tuesdays are busy nights in our house, so these evenings are typically designated as Grilled Cheese & Soup or Breakfast for Dinner.
• Fridays are typically “fun” nights (our substitute for not going out to eat) and we make either pizza or a Mexican dish.
This leaves me only three nights each week to be creative. Typically one of these nights is a crock-pot night, and for each of the other two I pick a favorite chicken and beef dish.
It is that easy, and takes me less than an hour each month to plan!
This once-a-month meal planning has not only assisted my dinner-time organizational skills, but has been a major factor in improving our grocery budget. I believe that meal planning has improved our grocery budget by at least as much as the use of coupons, if not more, and I will post more details on this at a later date. Below is a link to this month’s dinner planning menu, I hope you find this helpful.
March Menu Planning
And, for the record, I was having somewhat of an off day last week and asked Dean if he’d rather have barbecued chicken or chicken parm for dinner. His response:
“Let’s do baked chicken, we haven’t had that in a while!”
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