After a particularly frustrating week of playing "What should we have for dinner?" and feeling mostly like I'd lost, I decided something needed to change. I feel/felt like we were eating the SAME things every night, or every other night. Dinner was quickly becoming the meal I hated to eat.
"What's for dinner?" was met with the same staples: roast, steak and hamburgers. Well we sure had the beef industry booming. Our taste buds? Not so much. As much as I love a good steak or a well cooked pot roast, there are really only so many ways to cook them - or at least so many ways that the people I have to feed will eat.
The mouths I currently need to feed include mine, my husband's, my mom's and my dad's. We're all adults and should be past the "ewww no that's icky" stage, right? Or not. My husband will eat just about anything, save a few things. My mom hates chicken that "tastes like chicken" and for the last several weeks has been fixing her own food on the side because she doesn't want what's for dinner (Want to bet what kind of evil eye I'd get if I tried that with her cooking??). My dad likes to think he's an adventurous eater, but really he likes to say "That looks/sounds good" and then only eat two bites of it before he decides it's not his favorite. I LOVE to cook and I love to try cooking new things. I find that most things I might turn up my nose at if someone else made it, I readily eat, and add to my "must cook again" list, if I make it myself.
And so that is where we stood on Wednesday. Fed up with dinner and eating the same rotation of roast, steak and hamburgers. "No more!" I said and decided that dinners will once again be yummy.
I went in search of meal planning guides. What do I need to know to meal plan? What IS a meal plan? How can it help me? Google was most definitely my friend.
And then I found Vertex42.com and their meal planner section.
I decided to use their monthly meal planner because I think it would be most helpful for me to see a month at a time so we aren't stuck having tacos every Tuesday (though we have before and Taco Tuesday was quite fun for some months).
It's got space where you enter all of the meals and sides you'd like to be options for each month you're working on and then when you go back to the main calendar view, you choose the meals and sides for each day from drop down menus. IT'S AMAZING!
It made it so easy for me to think of what we already have in the freezer and input things based on that. I also made a "Freezer meal" option for those days I don't want to actually cook much. Those are things like frozen dinners or already prepared just heat and eat type meals. (To be honest, we don't eat those all that much)
So I sat down to plan out the rest of the month and came up with a plan that repeats only a few things.
I also hope that this helps us make better use of sales on meats especially. We tend to buy a bunch of meat when we realize the freezer is empty and then continue to re-buy the things we run out of regardless of whether or not it's on sale.
How do you figure out the "What's for dinner?" dilemma? Any tips or tricks to meal planning?
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