Last week, I described our focus on food, taking on the “foodie” label. Growing, preserving, eating and selling food drives much of what we do here at the Farm. With all this abundance, meal planning should be a breeze. There is no reason to plod from refrigerator to freezer, to the pantry and back again trying to decide what to eat. I always come up with something, finding that any one meal is easy to produce, but my desire is to have a full week of perfectly planned menus. In this fantasy, I see myself spending a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon prepping ingredients, writing out the week’s menu including snacks and posting it prominently in the kitchen.
Here’s what actually happens:
I stall and procrastinate until Sunday is over. All the good ideas for balanced meals that take advantage of preparing ingredients in advance drift away. Every evening finds me scurrying around at the last minute while hunger gnaws, to throw something together just before mealtime.
Planning for lunch happens the same way; throw a few things in a lunch bag, hoping it will be tasty enough to ward off the temptation to go through a drive through. Clearly we have been surviving for a few decades this way and our meals are nutritious and frequently fresh; but this is not the way I really want to manage the kitchen.
It’s time to try an experiment.
I commit to establishing our weekly menu in advance for a month, prepping ingredients ahead when possible and including nutritious snacks. I’ll post updates on my efforts, so keep checking back on this blog.
Will you take the menu planning challenge with me? Would you be interested in seeing my weekly menu plan?