Spontaneous….meal planning? Well, yes. I’m not going to talk about menu planning except in the vaguest of ways. I’m also not going to talk about meal prepping. If you are interested in learning more, there is an entire subreddit dedicated to the subject, or check out Budget Bytes. She also has a good explanation of meal prepping and many recipes and suggestions.  Instead, I think of meal planning as being ready to cook and making it easier to cook.

I mostly cook one meal, one serving at a time. I do it to control portions. I can’t go back for seconds because there are no seconds.  Cooking one meal, one serving at a time means that I have to cook every meal. I love to cook, and usually view cooking as kitchen therapy. It’s a way to shed the stress of the day. But there are days when having to cook dinner is just One. More. Thing. I. Have. To. Do. and I can hear the siren call of take out. It’s always been hard to resist delivery, but DoorDash and Uber Eats are making it even harder.

I resist the siren call of takeout by making it easy to cook. I shop once a week and have a general plan of what I will make during the week. I don’t have an explicit plan like if it’s Tuesday, it’s meatloaf. I will spiral back into bad habits if I try to be that rigid. I buy family packs of chicken thighs, chicken breasts, small steaks, and pork chops; then wrap and freeze them individually. That way, I can just take out one at a time to thaw. So, when I shop, I’m mostly just looking for the vegetable side dishes for the week. I get the vegetables ready for the week every Sunday.

So, what does it mean to have a general plan?  Unless I have a craving for something specific, I plan at the grocery store by looking to see what produce looks appealing. For example, if the Brussels sprouts look good, I will also buy baby portobellos to make a sauté or some apple to make a slaw. I almost always pick up some veggie basics like carrots, celery, onion and garlic.

Once I have picked my vegetables for the week, my next step is to get them ready to be cooked and eaten. I do most of my peeling and chopping on Sunday afternoon. I also prep veggies and make pickles on Sundays. As long as I am chopping, I might as well. Here is this week’s haul.

 

I bought cauliflower, romaine lettuce, red and yellow tomatoes, green beans, mushrooms, a bell pepper, onion and garlic. I already have an apple and lemons on hand. Obviously, I have a lot options for side dishes this week. I don’t have to decide right now what to make, I just need to get them ready to be cooked.

The first task is to clean the lettuce and wash the tomatoes. Having the lettuce cleaned and ready to be made into a salad makes it much more likely that I will eat salad. The washed tomatoes can be used in the salad or are ready to be a snack. I will have salads for lunch (the only meal I do meal prepping for) this week with lettuce, tomatoes, apple, almonds, cheddar and baked chicken breasts.

I cut the cauliflower into florets.

 

Just about anything I want to make with cauliflower will need florets.  I plan to have sautéed onions and bell pepper as a side dish sometime this week, so I cut those into thin strips.

If I need onions for a pan sauce, it won’t take much work to make a fine dice.  Same with the bell pepper.

I’ll also clean and slice some of the mushrooms (not all) to use in omelets, or potentially, in a mushroom cream sauce with the green beans. All the side dishes I’ve mentioned can go with any of the proteins I have available. When I come home from work, I can look at what I have in the refrigerator, decide what I want, and make it quickly. I’m not tied to a specific meal and cooking will still be easier and faster than takeout.

I often make roasted carrots, but it isn’t in the plan this week. Spring is here, with sunny skies and the highs during the days reaching into the fifties. It won’t be long before I’ll want to sit outside with a martini and pickled vegetables. So, today, I’m making pickled carrots -the thin sliced onions do double duty here. If I were going to need carrots for other dishes this week, I would make regular size carrots sticks. Those are good for roasting, and if I want dice, it will take only a moment to turn them into dice.

The green beans are already cleaned, so when I’m ready to cook them, they only need to be cut into bite sized pieces. Along with green beans in a mushroom sauce, I also plan to make green beans stewed with tomatoes, and maybe even roasted green beans.

Getting the vegetables ready to be cooked doesn’t take very long. The most time-consuming thing today was cleaning the lettuce. I don’t always prep things like onions or bell pepper, but I know that this week is going to be a bear and I want it to be as easy as possible to stick to eating healthy. I spent about one hour getting ready today and that includes getting the chicken into the oven, making salads, and making bread dough.