Monday, February 1, 2016

Working, working, working

I haven't gotten my 15 minutes of blogging in for quite awhile now.
However, yesterday I started to get plans in shape to change that.  I was working on a schedule, and trying to get one in place.
I was also trying to get my family onto the same page as I was, however they were being confrontational about the whole thing.  There were a multitude of excuses of "why nots".

I hate "why....nots..."

Over half of the day yesterday, I was doing meal planning.  My version of meal planning is trying to get one dinner listed in my calendar for each night.  For the year.  Some nights are easy, like Christmas Eve.  We always have fondue on Christmas Eve.  Holidays are easy too.  It's the rest of the year I have trouble with.
Here's what I do:
Each day of the week is assigned a certain type of meal, generally by the protein, but not always.
Sunday = chicken/poultry
Monday = pork
Tuesday = pasta
Wednesday = soup/stew
Thursday = beef
Friday = sandwiches/pizza/vegetarian/breakfast for dinner
Saturday = leftovers

From there, I hit my cookbooks.  Yesterday I started with one I had only tried one or two recipes from in the past, and worked my way through it.  Now, I know that Wednesday is soup/stew night, so I found all the recipes for soup or stew or chowder or whatever, and filled in as many Wednesday night from that cookbook as I possibly could.
Sometimes, recipes for soup or whatever are in a different section, like chicken.  Or vegetarian.  It can be a hunt to find them, so I go page by page.  I went as far as I could in that cookbook for each day.
Once I had gotten through that book, I picked up another.  One that had a lot of recipes that I know my family likes.  I got all those into my schedule.  This way we have a nice combination of things we KNOW we like, and a whole bunch of new stuff too.
On days when I don't have any writing to do, I can go through and try to get some of these dishes made ahead of time, effectively turning them into freezer meals.  If they don't work as freezer meals, I can at least get most of the ingredients together into one bag, label them and put the date when we're suppose to have that particular meal.
Next on my mass re-organization of my life, I'm going to be coming up with a cleaning schedule.  Let's hope that works, too.

Or at least it's imperfectly perfect.

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