Getting Ahead

Are you a meal planner?  Do you make a grocery list on the weekend and coolly and calmly get dinner on the table each night?  I wish.  Every few months, I start out with the best of intentions, poring over my cookbooks and bookmarked web pages, listing everything that I want to make, eliminating the things that my husband and kids probably won’t touch, then making a week’s menu.  Even with the menu and grocery list, I rarely feel less stressed out about mealtime, and often, I don’t follow the plan.

This weekend, I tried a different strategy.  Rather than make a menu and grocery list, I thought of some key ingredients that take a lot of prep time or benefit from pre-cooking.  With a few shortcuts in the refrigerator, I hope to have a better cache of ingredients with which to pull together quick meals or to add to recipes I’ve bookmarked for “sometime.”  I washed and dried a few bags of greens.  I made a batch of dal.  I roasted one huge butternut squash and froze chunks of another.  I made a mushroom stroganoff and boiled noodles for vegetarian lunches this week.

The butternut squash might turn into coconut curry pumpkin soup or get tossed with fusilli and goat cheese.  The pre-washed chard might be added to smoothies or sautéed for a vegetable side at dinner.  I may add some leftover short ribs to the dal to make it more appealing to the kids and husband or keep it vegetarian and serve it with brown rice.  It did feel like I spent hours in the kitchen this weekend, but I was able to talk to my family while washing greens, show my middle daughter how to peel a humongous squash safely, and enjoy my time over the stove instead of feeling resentful about another chore to get through after a long day at my paying job.  Just knowing that so much of the grunt work was done while I was relaxed and spending semi-quality time with my family will almost motivate me to try it again.  Maybe even before Spring.

What do you do keep ahead of the “What’s for dinner?” conundrum?  Do you subscribe to a meal planning service like the Six O’Clock Scramble?  Do you the Dinner A Love Story food diary method?  Or is more ad hoc at your house, like it usually is at mine?