2024, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

Menu Planning

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I grew up with a dad who had a small business and a mom who, when she wasn’t teaching, was helping my dad at his coffee shop. That left me at home to fend for myself for meals. If my mom cooked, it was usually on Sunday. During the week and after school I lived on toast, bologna sandwiches, and cereal until I was about 10 when I started to cook real food for myself. Husband grew up in a more traditional family that had three set meals a day, as his mom was a homemaker who had the time to plan and prepare meals. It was easier for me to adjust to his expectations for daily meals than it was for him to scrounge without planning. That made him anxious.

Our meals lately have been planned on the spur of the moment, as we never know what fresh veggies we may find in the garden or the Farmers Market. We can’t bear to let anything go to waste, so we are always planning how to cook up the surplus veggies that weren’t used in any dish we just cooked. So, if I cook too many white beans or chickpeas, we have to find another recipe that will use up the surplus, which usually means yet another trip to the grocery store to get what we don’t have for the new recipe to use the leftovers in.

I blame Bill, the Hutterites at the Farmers market, and the New York Times for the unusual dishes we made recently. I mentioned the other day on the Trail that we had 8 eggplant plants, and Bill commented that was a lot of Baba Ghanoush. Well, that forced me to buy a large jar of tahini, and Husband decided we should make a tahini-yoghurt sauce for some lamb burgers he cooked on the grill, and then I suggested that if we just bought one more pint of cherry tomatoes to go with the leftover pint we had from an earlier white bean caprese salad, and got some curly pasta, we could make this tahini-parmesan pasta salad recipe from the NYT. We did, and it was delicious.

The Hutterites were selling sweet corn on Saturday at the Farmers Market, and wouldn’t you know, the NYT featured a charred corn and chickpea salad with lime crema. We had limes we needed to use up. I cooked a pound of dry chickpeas and we ate that salad Saturday night. I only needed half of the chickpeas I cooked, so we had the other half last night in an Indian curry. You see how this goes.

I feel fortunate to have a love for cooking, a partner who also loves to cook, and a budget that allows us to eat the way we do. I will probably need to get another jar of tahini sometime next week, though. The eggplants have set fruit and are getting bigger.

What is your strategy for meal planning? What was your family’s pattern for meals? Favorite pasta salads?

25 thoughts on “Menu Planning”

  1. I do almost all the meal planning—for dinner that is—the considerations being what we have on hand and need to use up, what sounds appealing at the moment, and what is different from dinners we’ve had most recently.
    Neither Robin nor I eat much the other meals typically. A piece of toast or two in the morning perhaps and little or no lunch- maybe a piece of fruit or a small dish of some leftover. I love pasta salads and if that’s the leftover I’ll more than likely have some for brunch or lunch.

    In previous years my go-to pasta salad was a chicken tarragon salad but for some reason our tarragon this year has not performed and the salad requires a lot of tarragon so I’ve substituted a curried chicken pasta salad and a Greek pasta salad.

    When I was a kid, breakfast and dinner were family meals. My mother was home and my dad went off to work. Lunch was impromptu and frequently took place at a friend’s house. Typical lunch there would be some kind of canned soup and a boiled wiener.

    We planted two eggplants this year. They have been ridiculously productive, so much so that yesterday I picked five large ones and we sliced and breaded them and froze them for use next winter. We still have an overabundance. Eight plants would have been frightening.

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  3. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    My meal planning is pretty loose and dependent on what is in season in the summer. Between now and mid-October is the best eating of the year. Most weeks there is a meal of fresh sweet corn and bacon and tomato sandwiches. Often with pesto if I have basil, and I do! Otherwise in retirement, it is “what do I wanna eat?”

    I do make a large pasta salad in the summer to nibble on all week. After September there is a pot of soup each week which replaces the pasta salad. Then I make a casserole of some kind, as well as a grilled meat (chicken, pork chops, salmon, etc). That is it. The formula has worked for years and keeps the fridge full until Friday, when we often go out for a meal. Having just arrived home yesterday afternoon, today will be about grocery shopping and cooking.

    Regarding eggplant: I dislike them. There are no eggplants in my world.

    Pasta salads. Greek Orzo, Tuna and Shell Macaroni; Thai Peanut Noodle; Norma Zimmer Chicken Salad; What is in the Fridge? Pasta Salad. I also have a Wild Rice Chicken Salad that is good.

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    1. Because we had our second major chard harvest yesterday, Husband planned an Indian greens dish as well as Indian Lambchops to go with the curried chickpeas.

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  5. I try to plan meals, and sometimes I succeed. Usually a recipe or an idea inspires me, I think of what I have and what I need, go shopping, then try to make whatever it was that inspired me. That sometimes lasts up to a week. I like to make soups in the cooler seasons, and I usually clean out the refrigerator for these. Most of my soups are vegetarian or vegan, although I do make chicken and wild rice soup too. Soups are often made of whatever I have on hand.

    I like to make eggplant Parmesan.

    My favorite recipe is Jacque’s Orzo Pasta salad. I really like that one. Matter of fact, I’ve got some Greek olives, grape tomatoes, orzo pasta… hmmmm.

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    1. I find planning meals for just me a bit difficult. I often forget to thaw things for the next day. I have many restaurants within a mile of me, but I still do cook almost all my meals from fresh, just not with much planning and effort. Aldi is an easy stop on the way home from Sandra, as is Cub.
      Clyde

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  6. There is NO rhyme nor reason, and very little planning in our eating except around schedule. A cooked breakfast by either of us when possible, meaning we have cold cereal a couple of times a week. Husband makes excellent pancakes…

    Lunch and dinner vary as mentioned above – to use up as much as possible with as little waste… I try and give us a 1-day break before having leftovers, unless I drastically alter them.

    I’ve been taking notes when food videos appear while I’m scrolling thru FB. Unfortunately there are now dozens of these little scraps of paper, and I need to try some and organize. I’m caught by the ones that show a 1-pot version of some pasta or rice recipe. I hate the time and waste (and heat, in summer) involved in cooking pasta before assembling.

    Just found a mini-lasagna one that uses long, thin-sliced zucchini in place of noodles. I’ll let you know if I actually do it.

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  9. Like Wes, it’s catch as catch can these days at our house. YA is not a big breakfast eater and I’m not a big dinner eater so for the most part, we are each on our own for meals. Most planned meals that we share happen on the weekends.

    And no eggplant here either

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  10. Wen I was growing up, my family always had an evening meal that was planned, but most of the other food during the day was just improvised. I remember of having a lunch of saltine crackers with butter on them. If you spread soft butter on a saltime, then topped in with another saltine, and pressed the two together, the butter would squirt out of the holes in the saltine in little noodle formations.

    We also made sandwiches with summer sausage and potato chips.

    Breakfast was often cereal, – cold cereal with milk, or malt-o-meal – or sliced bananas or peaches in milk, or peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

    If my mother felt like cooking in the morning, she might fry up leftover boiled potatoes, and we’d eat them with ketchup. Or sometimes there would be eggs with slices of leftover hot dogs scrambled into them.

    These days I try to keep on hand foods that need minimal preparation – fruits, cereal, oatmeal, bread or muffins, cheese and crackers, frozen or canned vegetables, beans, pasta, canned tomatoes and tomato sauce, canned chicken and tuna. Then planning is not a requirement.

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  11. The whole ‘idea’ of egg plant grosses me out. Although Kelly has made ratatouille once before. And it’s a pretty color.

    We like pasta salad. Both the cold ‘macaroni salad’ as well as anti-pasta salad.

    We were at a wedding Saturday and the conversation at our table during the reception was about how our dinners were growing up.
    Mom worked for several years while I was growing up so Dad would send me to the house to make lunch. It was often french toast. Or baked beans. I don’t remember having too many left overs, which is odd, because I know we had some. And some days he’d do saltines and milk.
    Dinner was meat and potatoes. Always boiled potatoes (and to this day, my mom will not eat potatoes) and usually hamburger something. There was a TV in the dining room and Dad watched the 6PM news, then we went to the barn to milk.

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