Posts in "Mise-en-Place"

I just can’t seem to manage consistently planning meals for two weeks in a row. This last week, however, was probably my best non-planned out week of meals. Several of the meals were either leftovers of meals or used the uncooked protein from meals from the prior week. For example, I did a pot roast stew on Tuesday night in the slow cooker using the portion of the beef that I didn’t use from the Beef Stroganoff. Since we will be on vacation half of next week, I am going to be super ambitious and try to plan out 10 whole days of meals. However, considering that I am writing this on Monday morning, I might have already made this a losing proposition.

What’s In The Refrigerator

Through most of February, we didn’t create a meal plan at all. It was terrible and caused a fair amount of stress. It reminded me how much I really dislike the just-got-home-from-work “what do you feel like for dinner” conversation. We end up going out to eat or getting take-out more often, and it just doesn’t feel as satisfying. I am making a renewed effort to make time for meal planning each week. This attempt at making it a regular thing will revolve around doing as much of the planning as I can before I go for a run on Saturday mornings. Surprisingly, we don’t have anything on the calendar for next week, which means I have a full slate of meals to plan for! The only piece to account for is that I am planning on running home from work on Tuesday - which means I need to do something in the slow cooker for that dinner.

I’m watching the Grammy’s while trying to meal plan. It’s terrible, because the acts go between artists that I don’t care about and acts that I sort-of-kind-of want to enjoy. And then there are the performances that demand I stop what I’m doing and pay attention. These are the singers who pour their heart and soul into every word and it shows. Lady Gaga, P!nk, Bruno Mars, K$sha, Patti Lupone &ndash you can’t help but be enraptured by their time on the screen. But enough about music, it’s time for putting together this week’s meal plan.

After two weeks of solid meal planning, the third week got skipped entirely. Katie worked on Saturday and I was home on MLK, which meant that by the time my weekend was over, I was already thrown well off of a schedule. I never made time to do the meal planning and thus it didn’t get done. Let that be the lesson for that weekend – whatever isn’t made a priority doesn’t get done. In order to keep these meal planning sessions going, I need to make it a priority. Even if that means it is prioritized over sleep. But here I am at 20:25, already starting to put together this upcoming week’s meal plan.

This is an experimental recipe. I tried it once, and then it clearly needed some tweaking. I’ve made the changes in the recipe below, and if it needs more adjustments after the second time through, I’ll come back and update this post.

The first week of meal planning went well… as well as a first week of any experiment goes. I didn’t do a very good job of thinking about all of the sides and ingredients needed to accompany the main protein. Additionally, I didn’t account for the time it would take to prep some of the dishes. Since I’ll be back at work this next week, prepping food the night before or morning of is going to be key to successfully following the meal plan this week.

A simple dish with a lot of flavor and it doesn’t cost too many SmartPoints. Pairs well with a salad. Recipe follows.

As with all new years, this one will start with the best of intentions. My wife is diving into her WeightWatchers eating plan, so I am going to try and do a better job with planning out the weekly meals, weekly shopping, and hopefully allow myself more time to do any of the other myriad things throughout the week that I wish I found time for. It’s all about priorities, and for these first few weeks my priorities are going to be meal planning/executing, regular exercise and recovery, and career improvement.