The phrase “what’s for dinner” is one off the biggest road blocks to getting dinner on the
table in time. On most days, the average cook still doesn’t know what is for dinner by 4 p.m.  After a long frustrating day, dinner usually comes from one of three ideas:

*Preparing an old favorite, one of a few dishes that you serve all the time

*Stopping on the way home for fast food

*Fighting your way through the super market after work (we all know how much fun that is)

There is an easier way to plan your meals!  Visualize the five nights of the week as slots that need to be filled with a menu. If your family likes a wide variety in their menus, your weekly menu could include fish, chicken, pork, beef and some kind of meatless casserole. If they like chicken better than anything else, have chicken two nights in the week. A desk calendar or any calendar that has room to write works great for meal planning.

Sit down and write in the main dish for each of those slots.  If there is something your family really likes, plan on cooking a double batch and freezing half of it for those hectic days. After you have entered your main dish, go back and enter your bread, vegetable, salad and desert. It really makes it easier to plan your shopping list when meal planning this way.

Here’s another advantage to the calendar pages if you and your family have busy after school and work schedules:  plan your meals around those activities by writing them on the same calendar.

When planning your meals, assume dinner groundwork will take between 15 and 45 minutes.While this may not seem like it, in the end this simple process can be a real time saver, in addition to eliminating the stress of not knowing what to cook.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 2:40 am and is filed under Cooking, Eating Habits, Food, Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.