How do you do?

Faithful readers, forgive my absence from the blogosphere. Sometimes life happens. I have two weeks of menus to post and hope to update both today or one today and one tomorrow.

The reason I started the blog was to help others begin to plan healthy menus each week. I usually simply share my menus and recipes to give you some new ideas. Some weeks my menus are fairly thin which happened recently because we were out of town for most of that week. When that happens I will still give you the limited menu, but I will also take the blog space to share how I plan my menus. There is an old proverb that says if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish he will eat for a lifetime. Today I will be a little more of a teacher.

The week of March 28 - April 3 was a short week because we traveled to our niece's wedding.

Monday

Spicy Thai Chicken Sausage

Baked Potato

Cole Slaw

I simply pan fried the sausage which I bought on a recent trip to Whole Foods. I fried it like you pan fry a dumpling - I added water to the pan and steamed it for the last few minutes. It was an experiment that seemed to work. The outer casing was a little softer.

I bake potatoes in the oven rather than the microwave. More energy involved, less green, I know, but my family likes the texture better from the oven.

My "secret" cole slaw recipe is packaged cole slaw mix and Marzetti cole slaw dressing. Quick, easy and always good.

Tuesday

My husband needed to work late, so only my five-year old and I would be eating. I decided to take the easy route and thaw some of the spaghetti sauce I had in the freezer (mentioned in blog from 3/20) and make us shells with sauce. I also made a salad for me.

Wednesday

Last day of cooking for the week. We have a small group at our house on Wednesday nights and I had a busy day since it was the day before we were leaving, so it was a good night for something from the crockpot. I went with Crockpot Barbecue, Terra Chips, and more easy cole slaw. I know barbecue purists are cringing, but I like the occasional crockpot barbecue. I used a pork roast on the bone for extra flavor. The recipe is from my favorite Crock Pot cookbook - Fix-it and Forget-it. I found this recipe which is nearly identical. I substituted a bottle of beer for the two cups of water. I'm not sure it added any significant flavor. The recipe made quite a bit and since we were going out of town, I froze the leftovers.

We love Terra Chips. They are chips made from many different types of root vegetables, not just potatoes. This week we had Sweets and Beets, which is all sweet potatoes and beets. Terra Chips are rather pricey so I only buy them when I find them on sale.

Thursday - Sunday

We were out of town at our niece's wedding. We had wonderful food the entire weekend, but I neither planned nor cooked any of it!

Planning a Menu

So let's talk a little about how to put together a weekly menu. The first thing I do is look at our schedule for the week. What days do I have time to cook? What days do I need something quick and easy? Who will be home for dinner on which nights? It doesn't make sense to plan a lasagna which takes at least 30 minutes to put together and another hour to cook when you won't get home from a long day of ballet lessons and piano lessons and soccer practice until after 5:00. You will head to the drive-through every time. If the calendar is crowded, that is a day to plan leftovers or something quick. There is also no reason to cook for a crowd if no one will be home to eat it, unless you are planning to cook for the freezer and eat again in the future.

After I figure out our schedule, then I look at what is on sale at my favorite grocery store. I always keep the weekly grocery store ad until I make my menu. It helps me narrow down my choices. I quickly review what I have in my refrigerator and freezer. Then I start looking for recipes. I usually pull a few of my favorite cookbooks and just start looking. I use the index heavily. If I know I have a pork tenderloin in the freezer, I look under pork tenderloin in the index. Since I keep all of my menus in spiral bound notebooks, I can also look back to what I have made before. Sometimes I will be looking for one thing and something else will catch my eye. This happened recently and will be on the next week's blog post. On an old menu, I saw a poached salmon recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks. I looked at the recipe in the cookbook and across the page was a recipe for mango salsa. I had a mango in the refrigerator and a pork tenderloin in the freezer. Voila! I can make a grilled pork tenderloin with mango salsa. I guess my creative style is similar to the children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie... Sometimes I go to my favorite recipe sites and see what others are cooking. I love food.com. Other times I will know that I want to cook a particular food and will just Google it. I also have several recipe apps on my phone. Then I just fill in the recipes on the day for which it is planned. I make sure I write down the name of the recipe and the cookbook and page number or website where I found it. That way I can find it when I want to cook that week and find it another time if I want to cook it again in the future. I also make a note if it needs something special, like a long marinating or chilling time so I don't try to start something an hour before dinner that needed eight hours of marinating. While the recipe is open, I write down what ingredients I need on my grocery list. When I finish the entire menu, I also add any other items I need on the list. Now for the overachievers there is one extra (optional) step. You can rewrite your list in store order. This makes the trip to the grocery store faster, but it does take a little more time. I often do this for my five year old who likes to help me shop. She can't read cursive so I have to print her list anyway, and while I am at it, I put her list in store order. Guess whose list I usually use? I have heard of people who keep a master list on the computer and then use it as a template, fill in the blanks and print. I still write my list out by hand.

I admit that planning a weekly menu takes some time. It usually takes me an hour or two depending on if I have anything in mind before I start. I am always looking at recipes so if I see something I want to try, I write it down on the current menu so I will remember when I start the next one. I think the investment of time once each week certainly saves me time over the course of the week. Plus, I only have to grocery shop once each week which saves time and money and we eat out far less often. As I have mentioned before, even with planning, I still have to be flexible because plans change, but overall I feel better prepared each week.

I will stop here for now. I have other topics I want to cover in the weeks ahead, but this is the basics of my weekly menu planning. Thanks for stopping by. Please come again soon!