FOUR MOMS, THIRTY-FIVE KIDS!Be sure to visit the other three moms at their blogs:
Kim, at Life in a Shoe included meals that regularly show up on their menu.
Kimberly, at Raising Olives, has a number of very practical and sensible ideas, as we would expect.*
Connie calls her method 'The Slacker Mom' Approach, and it's a very workable way to handle menus as well. Go see what she means.
But stop! Finish reading my post first. Pretty please?
There must be fifty ways to plan your menus. I'll take a brief look at seven of them:
1. You give careful consideration to what you have on hand. Then you check the sales fliers and see what is on sale. You consult your favorite
cookbooks
, the internet, the internet, and the internet, as well as the three ring binder (s) where you keep recipes you cut out from magazines, newspapers, and also where you store many of the old recipes your great-grandmother wrote out by hand. You make your menu list and shopping list together and every night of the week you fix just what you planned. The more you cook, the easier this gets.This is the best method. Sometimes.
2. You kind of do the above approach, but with more flexibility- you might have to make frequent alterations, as when you plan biscuits for company on a night when your company is keeping Passover week and not eating baking powder, or you planned a soup and the day turns out to be warm, or you planned a crockpot meal, but forgot to get it started at a reasonable time... This is the best approach.
3. You realize it's 5:00 and people are going to be hungry and you either order pizza or you call your husband or somebody at work and say, "Would you pick up dinner on your way home?" Although you're going to be spending a LOT of money if you do it this way too often, sometimes THIS is the best method.
4.You do what Smockity does. Sometimes THAT is the best method.
5. You go to the corner grocer's every morning to do the family marketing and buy just what you need for meals for a day, or at most two . Sometimes that is the best method.
6. You plan a month's worth of meal's at once and cook freezer meals
one day out of every month. I have done this for years at a time, and at the time I did it, THAT was the best method for me, and it could be the best method for you. When I did it, I found that we liked best about ten different meals, three or four batches of them so that we weren't eating the same main dish more than three times in a month. You think that's picky? When we first got married, my husband asked not to have the same main dish more than once a month. I was a newlywed, so worked really hard to achieve that, even on our beans and rice, rice and beans, beans over rice, rice over beans, beans sans rice, rice sans beans and potatoes boiled, broiled, baked, and fried budget.7. You send the kids out to show up at various neighborhood homes right around dinner time, making sure the kids are looking hungry and waif-like. This? It's probably NOT the best method.
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I like planning menus. I enjoy reading cookbooks for fun and I own somewhere around 300 of them. I have two very competent cooks still at home, and two in training. And I like a little adventure and a lot of variety.
*Me? I actually do serve meals I have never even tried before to company, and I make huge batches of freezer meals that we'll be tasting for the first time when I defrost one of 'em and cook it. We've had a couple major disasters, but mostly this has worked well for us.
You can bake all your bread from scratch, or not. It all depends on how much you like it, how much time you want to spend on that part of your life, how strong your hands are or how expensive your mixer is, and there is no one right answer for this.
You can have a set, rotating list of menus so that you never have to think about what's for dinner.
You can make menus entirely based on what's in your pantry, and use the sales fliers mainly to keep your pantry and freezer stocked.
You can cook the same five to seven meals all the time, every week, without variation so you never have to make a menu.
The way you plan your menus, and the menus that you plan, should be a reflection of who you are and who your family is, not somebody else's. So my family likes variety, lots of variety, and we enjoy ethnic foods, I enjoy meal planning, and what we make reflects those things.
I have never made chicken fried steak, we don't buy frozen fries or hash browns, I made fried chicken three or four times 25 years ago and haven't done it since, and I don't make spaghetti very often because I dislike pasta and think of all pastas, spaghetti is the most boring. We eat a lot of vegetarian, curries, asian foods, and Mexican foods. Meatloaf and hamburgers, not so much.
You need to be who you are, the best way you can. You don't need to be exactly like somebody else, and you can only ever be a second-rate imitation if somebody else is your model. It's okay, sometimes, in some areas, to settle for mediocrity. Oddly enough, sometimes it's even the best thing to do.
You may enjoy this example of a month's worth of freezer meals we made using all crockpot recipes.
You might enjoy perusing a couple of my recent menu posts.
Next week, The 4 Moms will be sharing about cooking from scratch and how we get it all done. The second half of that post will be a short one for me.
And I like Connie's reminder, so I am just
Previous posts in this series:
Previously at The Common Room (with links to the corresponding posts from t'other moms within the posts)
Introductions and biographies --
How we schedule--
Excitement or boring? The day we live blogged --
How we handled outings when we had only Littles--
Budgeting: The Growing Family Beats the Incredible Shrinking Dollar Pin It
I agree that every family does have to adjust for their family. But I also firmly believe that if we are to be the best stewards of the resources God has given us, some kind of planning needs to happen regularly. I have talked to families of four that spend almost a thousand a month on food, due to eating prepackaged, bought out, etc all the time. This is a gross waste of money. I know each person may come to this realization at a different time in their lives, and heaven knows I am not a perfect meal planner, but I also know that without planning something, we would spend way too much!!
ReplyDeleteWe love our ethnic food, too. Lots and lots of Asian (Korean, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, and curry, curry, curry) with some Italian (we do like pasta), Greek, tex-mex, and some boring but yummy Southern thrown in. Summers we do a lot of fresh vegetables as they're available from the garden, which of course means you can't plan because you never know which crops will produce when and how much.
ReplyDeleteJunkMale used to make huge batches of spaghetti and eat it for an entire month. He would have the same sandwich for lunch every day, the same cereal for breakfast (except on weekends when he had eggs), and the same spaghetti for dinner for months on end. The thought of that is horrifying to me. I love VARIETY, and when I can't have variety I want soup. Unfortunately, JunkMale requires about four servings of soup to even approach feeling full.
I would love to make freezer cooking work for us, but I can't figure out how to convert many of our favorite ethnic recipes (particularly the Korean ones) into freezer foods.
I agree that most of the time that is a horrible waste of money. But I also think that if a family *can* eat that way without going into debt, while still meeting all their other obligations including charitable giving, then I cannot say they are being horrible stewards. Restaurant owners need to eat and pay their bills, too. Of course, I doubt that there are very many families who can meet all their other obligations as they should while eating like that.
ReplyDeleteToo funny! I vacillate regularly betwixt and between the first 4 approaches, and I love whichever one I happen to be doing at the moment.
ReplyDeleteI too am utterly unexcited by spaghetti - at least in theory. But it's cheap (esp. sans meat) and my children love it, so it shows up regularly on our table when hubby and I have something more grown-up planned for ourselves. And strangely enough, I find it hard to resist just a small serving when it's there in front of me. I always find that I like it better than I remember.
I've only been married and running a household for about 3 years but I think I've done almost all of those too...and with a baby on the way, who knows what we will end up doing this summer!
ReplyDeleteI do have a new freezer arriving next week so I plan on doing a lot of freezer meals now (I will be checking out your link) to help us out until my mom arrives and takes over, and then again once she leaves but I'm also very lucky, my husband likes to eat the same thing over and over again. He has had a pb&j sandwhich, two piece of fruit and a granola bar for lunch almost every single day since I met him and has no problem eating the same 10 casseroles in rotation. In fact, he used to say his favorite meal was leftovers! I used to like variety, until I started cooking and now I like whatever I can make happen. I definitely agree that you need to find what works for your family.
I like the sauce with lots of cheese and garlic bread, but I could dispense with noodles altogether.
ReplyDeleteHere's what I do about baking bread because I have the attention span of a goldfish and can't handle the time commitment involved in baking yeast bread. Not noted in the link: it freezes really well, too.
ReplyDeletehttp://trialanderrorhomeec.blogspot.com/2009/03/bread.html
When I had two under two and found myself incapable of thinking of dinner anymore, we went onto a four-week rotation. Then when I added twins, we cut it down to two weeks' worth of the easiest menus. I never cook anything exactly the same twice, and DH grew up in a household with a single-week rotation, so it didn't get too boring.
ReplyDeleteThen we moved in with my parents, which has really made menu planning easy. Hopefully not a long-term solution, though.
I do mostly #2. I have a LOT of "rules" my cooking has to follow, that are imposed by other people. Besides the food allergies, that is. Here's an example of one: my husband refuses to eat the same meat twice in a row or the same food twice in a day, and that includes his lunches which he buys at work and I don't know about. So if the guys at work declare it's Taco Tuesday and he decides to go with them and I had tacos planned for dinner, I have to pivot on a moment's notice or my husband won't eat. Looking at his belly that doesn't seem like a half bad idea, but when you consider that I go to great lengths to make a meal we can all sit down and eat as a family, you can see why I don't just tell him to take a long walk off a short pier.
ReplyDeleteHarmony -- I don't know much about Korean food, but quite often with Thai and Indian I make a double or triple batch of sauce and freeze for later. We generally keep cold cooked meat in the fridge for a couple days at a time and it's easy to just cook some rice and veg. Often this saves me from informing Cee that it's omelettes for dinner, again. HTH
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting in this series! I am enjoying gleaning from you four moms. :)
ReplyDelete