Weekly menu planning
One thing I always meant to do, but never quite got around to before I got laid off, was writing up weekly dinner menus. They’ll help keep me organized! They’ll prevent me from forgetting what vegetables I have in the drawers! They’ll let me know what I need to buy!
Except it was One More Thing on top of doing my job and keeping the house clean and maintaining a marriage. Sometimes I’d write up three days or so, and then one of us would have a bad day at work and screw it — we were going out for Ethiopian, or ordering in Indian, and then I never seemed to get back on track. This was particularly a problem during the farm box months (which is more than half the year), because the farm boxes have so many veggies in them that if you don’t keep on top of it, you’re hip-deep in slightly spoiled food before you know it.
It’s easier now to work menu planning into my life — now that there’s less need for it, of course! Still, I enjoy it more than I thought I would.
Sample Weekday Menu
Dinner menu, Feb 23-27
Mon: chicken cottage pie
Tues: roast beef, swiss chard
Weds: pork chops, asparagus
Thurs: leftover roast, sauteed carrots
Fri: red sauce (sausage & pepper), pasta
Things are still subject to change, to unexpected bobbles in life, to unexpected leftovers — this past Monday, I halved a recipe for a 5-serving Persian dish called ghalieh-ye kadoo, and still ended up with enough leftovers that I had to figure out what else to serve with it last night…and I’ve still got 2 servings left. (Maybe the recipe meant 5 servings as a main course?)
But with this kind of planning, it’s a lot easier to know what I have left, what I need to accommodate, and where everything is going!