Meal Planning Check In

Meal Planning March is almost half over, and I'm here with a fascinating in-depth status report. 

First, let's check in with each guideline:

1. Plan each dinner at least 48 hours in advance.
   Yep, I've done that! Buuuuut... well, I'll explain below.

2. Incorporate stuff from the pantry, freezer and garden wherever possible.
   Doing pretty well here.

3. It's OK to rearrange the plan!
   Yeah, there has been some rearranging, some OK, some well... see below...

4. "Leftovers" and "going out" are completely legitimate planned meals. 
   Oooooh yeah they are.  How I love Leftover night.  "From the freezer" - also legitimate.

5. Once a week +, I will double up a recipe and put half in the freezer*.
Doing OK here, though we do have a tendency to leave leftovers in the fridge and pick at them.  Nothing wrong with that, except that we don't end up with a stockpile for "From the freezer" nights.

6. Aim for HELFY meals, but dude, it's OK to bust out and have a steak or some pasta carbonara now and then.
 A-OK!

All in all, it's going quite well... buuuut... we haven't totally stuck to the plan.  I changed the recipe (day of) a couple times, ate leftovers more than planned (because I forgot to defrost our frozen meal), and we ate out one night (because we wanted to go out, not out of desperation)  I'm all good with remaining flexible, but also don't want to slip so much that we're wasting food or spending time spinning my wheels in the search for a new recipe.

One issue is that I sometimes don't want to prepare the recipe I've chosen when I'm in overly-ambitious meal planning mode.  It may be because the recipe is intimidating or because the food just isn't what I'm in the mood for.  So the first tweak I'm making is to choose fewer new-to-me recipes - one a week is plenty!  I'll include more tried-n-true's - recipes that don't intimidate me (anymore).

So keeping that in mind, I created this week's meal plan.  Here she is!

Meal Plan   3/7/11-3/13/11

Ingredients to Use: Pasta, sweet potatoes, salmon, spinach

Monday

Tuna cakes, spinach salad

Tuesday

Grown-ups out – Grama watching kids Leftovers

Wednesday

Red Pepper Salmon Pasta (new-to-me recipe), salad

Thursday

St. Patrick’s Day!  Green pancakes for breakfast.  Corned beef & cabbage (also new-to-me, but Mr. Helfy will talk me through it.  Or maybe he'll just make it.)

Friday

Pizza – pepperoni, mozzarella.  Try thin crust recipe from CI (which is new-to-me so if I don't feel like doing something new, I'll use my old tried-n-true pizza dough recipe)

Saturday

From the freezer – mac n’ cheese

Sunday

Mr. Helfy's choice (seems like cheating, huh?  I like to leave a night open in case, as often happens, Mr. Helfy gets inspired to make something specific)

 There ya have it!  Wish me luck!