adventures in meal planning!

Whenever I've read blogs where people meal-plan, I've always thought that they were uber-organized super moms who need to do this sort of thing, lest they lose their last remaining marble. So since I'm not really any of those things (that organized, a mom, or quickly going insane), I've never really considered it as something we should do.

However, there was a night a few weeks ago where Will and I were griping and complaining the whole ride home about how starving we were, and then proceeded to do everything in the world when we got home except for make dinner. We chatted at length about our days, tidied the living room, put PJ's on - I may have even cleaned the bathroom as a stall tactic. We ended up cooking something kind of ghetto and didn't sit to eat until after 9PM. Yeah, unacceptable.

After this debacle, I said to him, "We need to have a weekly business meeting!" and I actually wasn't kidding at all. We both used to live in intentional communities (houses of 14-17 people who cooked and ate dinner together four nights a week, did chores, and lived the ups and downs of life and became super tight) where business meeting was a crucial factor in our success. This is where we assigned which pairs would cook dinner on which nights, which pairs would do dishes, check in on how chores went that past week - without it, we wouldn't have been able to function.

So I proposed to Will that we have a business meeting on Sunday nights where we analyze our weeks and plan meals from there. Monday after work, we'd do all our grocery shopping for the week - good thing we both had the chore of "grocery shoppers" in our communities! My shopping mate and I would even organize our lists by where the items were laid out in the store for utmost efficiency. We were pretty intense.

For Will and I, we think buying groceries based on meals will not only help us to be organized and efficient at meal time, but we think it will also cut down our grocery budget because we'll only be buying things that we know we'll have a specific use for in the immediate future. No extraneous purchases that might eventually go bad/expire anyway.

This past week, we were able to assess that we only needed to plan meals for three nights, because we went to the pub with a friend on Tuesday, and saved Friday for consuming the week's leftovers. Saturday we were with my parents and Sunday was the Superbowl! It was a nice three-day week for transitioning into a new system.

Now I know it won't always be this way, but we came up with some pretty swanky meals for week one! Totally utilized some awesome cookbooks that we have. Don't even ask about week two. Epic fail. But in our defense, the Superbowl fell during out business meeting, so we were behind from the start.

Here were our successful meals from last week (please excuse the poor kitchen lighting in these photos)!

MONDAY

grilled scallops with crispy leeks

photo by Will

I give this dish an A++. We'll definitely be having this one again.

Leeks are delish and the scallops were impeccable and super fresh. 

We live on the water in a fishing town for crying out loud.

WEDNESDAY

sesame chicken with edamame and quinoa

photo by me

I'd give it a B+. While I love edamame and quinoa, the sauce for the 

chicken wasn't what I was expecting, and I would have wanted more sauce 

than the recipe called for to make it a little less dry.

THURSDAY

penne with chicory and honeyed walnuts

photo by Will

I'd give this dish an A for what it is, but we'd change a few things next time around.

Neither of us had tasted chicory before, and it was a wonderfully bitter complement to 

the sweetness of the honey sauce. But we'd cut it thinner next time as to not be left with

these big bitter and wilted stalks at the bottom of our bowl. They were 

intimidatingly large the way the recipe called for them to be cut.

So that's that! Hopefully we can pick up this week's slack and deliver a good show next week.

Let me know if you want any of these recipes!