It's What's for Dinner

The other day my very good friend stopped by for some coffee and spoon carving.  We were chatting about life, and she lamented that, while she enjoys cooking, she does not enjoy having to decide what to cook every. single. night. 

I'm, mostly, okay with figuring out what's for dinner.  After two decades of being the head cook and bottle washer, it's just part of the rhythm of my day, and on those days when I'm feeling out of sync, Deus Ex Machina will order pizza ... erm ... make dinner (it's not always pizza ... sometimes it's Chinese food).  

But ... eating out is expensive, especially when one has dietary restrictions - like no wheat, which is in EVERYTHING.  But also, I still have to decide what we're going to order, and then, there's the whole wait time and driving to pick it up.  Since we don't eat drive-thru sorts of food (see the gluten-free above - the only menu item in most fast-food joints that's GF is salad, and if I'm going to eat salad, I'll just make that here), it's more often than not faster (and more convenient, actually) to cook something here.  

So, those pizza days are rare, which means I have usually decided what's for dinner by noon, and sometimes, depending on what I've decided to cook, I've already started cooking (like if I'm planning on slow-cooker pot roast, it will go on the crockpot first thing in the morning).

Meal planning is often a topic of discussion for people in my circles and suggestions for making life easier for those of us who have to make that daily decision run the gamut from meal subscription services to cooking a whole week's worth of meals in a day and putting them in a special refrigerator or freezer.

I have a friend who asked advice from her friends on social media regarding how to make answering that daily question What's for Dinner? easier, and one of her friends suggested the latter above - prepping on Sunday for lunches and dinners through the week.  She says it takes her all day, but it's worth the time and effort saved during the week.  She even posted a picture of her prepped meal refrigerator.  I was in awe!  The whole set-up was incredibly impressive.

I am confident that I will never achieve that level of organization.

When my children were younger, I attempted to do some version of meal planning - to save time and money.  One incarnation of our meal planning entailed writing out on a calendar what we would make for dinner each weekday and who would do the cooking (one of my many failed attempts to get my kids helping with meal prep).  A grocery list was compiled and grocery shopping ensued.  

What we discovered is that we are (or maybe just *I* am) the kind of people who decide what we want to eat based on what we feel like eating that day.  So, the meal plan said "baked pasta" on Wednesday, but I didn't feel like baked pasta on that day.  It was the middle of August, and it had been a scorching hot day, and there was no way that I was going to heat up the house to bake pasta.  I didn't even want to boil water inside.  I'm pretty sure we ended up making a special trip to the farm stand that day and picking up corn and watermelon.  The corn was cooked on the grill, along with some hamburg patties.

I'm also pretty sure that the alt-meal wasn't even one we had considered when we made our plan.

But that's the thing I always wonder when I hear about people who make meal plans and prepare a week's worth of meals in advance.  How are they gonna know on Sunday, what they're going to want to eat on Wednesday?

Suffice it to say that I am a meal-prep failure.  

But I am a very good, figure-it-out-spur-of-the-moment kind of cook.  

I was 10 when the television show Three's Company debuted, and every time I cook eggs, I think of Jack Tripper, that first morning, when Chrissy Snow and Janet Wood found him sleeping in their bathtub, and the topic of roommates came up.  He needed a place to live.  They needed a roommate, but the lynchpin to his being invited to stay was that he could cook.  He made breakfast for them using leftover ingredients from the going away party for their previous roommate and a few things from the refrigerator.  I was always impressed with Jack's innovation in the kitchen.

And I guess that's the way I decided I was going to cook, because there have been many times in my life, when a very limited grocery budget, WIC subsidies, and food gifts (like frozen raspberries from my grandma) meant that I needed to be creative in the kitchen.  In fact, when I was a poor, married-with-children college student, a glut of eggs from the WIC program prompted me to learn how to make quiche.  Quickest, easiest, fancy food ever! 

Not meal planning has actually resulted in some interesting meal components.  The other night, I made hamburger patties, but we didn't have any buns or any bread of any kind, and so I cooked the patties with onions and barbecue sauce to make them more like a steak, and less like hamburgers.  

It's not something that I have ever had anyone else cook for me, in that way.  Neither is it something that I've seen a recipe for, and so I'm pretty certain that if I were someone who meal prepped and/or planned ahead of time, that particular meal component would never have been part of my diet. 

Thing is, when I am purchasing food, I don't think in terms of meals.  I think in terms of ingredients.  What things do we need so that I can put it all together, like a tasty puzzle, and make a meal.  Most of our meals are pretty simple and contain some stable ingredients. 

When I get ready to make dinner, it will have certain components.  Usually, some kind of meat, like hamburg.  I will often have a starch, like potatoes, pasta, or rice.  There will be some sort of vegetable, usually something green, like lettuce for a salad, or cabbage made into coleslaw.  

Last night I made fried rice with a 1/2 lb of sandwich steak cut into tiny pieces, eggs from our chickens, broccoli from my garden, onions, and some leftover rice.  I am getting low on Tamari (which is gluten-free soy sauce), which I usually add to my fried rice, and so, instead, I added curry powder for flavoring.  I also add sesame oil.  Sometimes I add fresh grated ginger or other vegetables.  

Tonight we're having the above mentioned barbecue burgers with the bread I made this afternoon and coleslaw using cabbage from the garden.  I will add some pickled jalapenos I made the other day to the coleslaw to give it a little zing.  

I also make all of my own dressings and sauces (usually a mayonnaise based dressing), which means, I will almost always have on hand: mayonnaise (and I hope to report soon that I'm making my own with our glut of eggs), an assortment of vinegars, milk or half-and-half, and all sorts of herbs and spices.

I can make a really good ranch-style "house" dressing that just tastes good on almost anything.  Tweaking the herbs makes that house dressing into a creamy Italian dressing, and my coleslaw dressing is good enough to eat with a spoon on some crackers.  

For me, having the ingredients to cook just about anything we're craving has been the best solution for "meal prep" and planning.  It means a little more daily planning, because I need to start figuring out what's for dinner in the morning to be sure that I have thawed meat, but it's easier, for me, to plan a little each day rather than spend an entire day cooking, or spend a half a day writing out what I plan to cook in five days, only to discover that no wants baked pasta when it's almost hot enough in the kitchen to cook without the oven, but turning on the oven would put the house in the hot-as-the-bowels-of-Hell region. 

How do you meal prep?  Be sure to leave your comment below!