For those of you who actually cook, how much time and effort go into planning the meals?
Do you try out new recipes much or stick with a set number of tried and true?
How has your meal planning changed over your cooking life?
Time and effort? About 2 minutes, which is how long it takes me to decide what I wanna make. I don’t cook anything that takes more than, say, a half hour.
I stick to tried and true stuff, mostly from the Hamburger Helper genre.
If I could afford it I would eat every meal in a restaurant. I hate cooking.
I order from peapod, I don’t know if you have that where you live. It’s an online grocery order and delivery service. Yay! It makes life easy and you can sort by type of food or just type in what you want. I usually cook 3-4 dinners at home so I usually plan a chicke, a beef, a pork and sometimes a fish/veggie meal. I make up recipes as I go along but sometimes see one in my cooking mags athat I’m dying to try (or just get bored, thumb through the mags and pick one at random). I cook at home much more than I used to (I used to only cook 1 dinner at home a week, but I’m trying to be good now.) So, about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes a week to plan. Yeah.
It depends entirely on my mood. There are days when meal planning takes only the amount of time it requires to look into the refrigerator and see what’s there (those are the “tomato soup and grilled cheese” days, typically), days when I do put a little thought into what would be good, but not enough thought to make anything new or different (taco night!), and, although they’re rare, days when I feel motivated to look into one of my many cookbooks and plan out a new meal.
The easy nights take about two minutes’ planning and no more than 15 minutes of preparation, the mid-level meals probably take ten minutes to plan and up to 30 minutes to prepare, and the well-thought-out ones take up to three hours to plan and one to two hours to make (including the inevitable trip to the store for the essential ingredients I didn’t have).
When I first started cooking, I knew how to make three or four things, and they all took at least an hour to actually prepare. Now, 20 years later, I can make something like ten different meals in under 30 minutes without looking at a cookbook, and I can make anything at all if I have a recipe and a good bit of time. I still don’t usually want to, however.
I have to cook for kids either 4 or 5 nights per week. And it ain’t easy.
Sometimes I take the easy way out and eat out, especially if we have divergent plans.
But, I try to cook at least 3 nights, just because I can’t afford to eat out. I have standby meals, which take no thought, and not much extra effort. They take up to half an hour to prepare.
I spend about halff an hour per week actually planning what I’m doing. This includes reading the grocery ads in the paper. I LOVE to cook. And I wish I could do more, but coming home a 5 or 6 at night doesn’t let you get much of a jump on dinner.
My wife can discuss food for hours. She’d never cook the same meal twice if she could get away with it. We usually start talking about friday night dinner on monday.
Of course, she used to cook professionally(in a major NY restaurant), and food is still one of her greatest passions.
Okay, the following post is almost guaranteed to make at least some of you think: this woman needs to get a life! But keep in mind that I am a SAHM, I take pride in what I do, and I try to do it to the best of my ability.
On Sunday mornings, I go to the grocery store right down the street and get a Sunday paper, so I have coupons and the sales circular. I sit down and clip the coupons and look at the sales circular, to try and plan what we will eat for dinner this week (I usually cook 7 nights a week). Keeping in mind what I already have in my freezer and pantry, adding in what’s on sale or has a good coupon, I come up with 7 nights worth of dinners. Then, I look at my calendar to see which days are really hectic, and those are my “crock pot” days. I list, on notebook paper, what’s for dinner each night. I post this paper on the fridge. This accomplishes two things: one, I know what needs to come out of the freezer or go in the crock pot in the morning. Two, when someone asks “what’s for dinner”, I can direct them to the list on the fridge. I do all my marketing on Sunday night (I do a whole weeks’ worth at once, so I don’t have to go back to the store at all during the week), when the baby’s down to bed and the store’s not busy.
I spend about an hour a week doing this.
I generally plan meals for about a week at a time, and the process takes about fifteen minutes. I hate doing it but it’s a lot less stressful than wondering what to make for supper every single night, and it helps avoid overuse of convenience foods and carry-out/fast food.
Sometimes I’ll even plan further in advance; for instance, I do anything I can to avoid having to go into any store, even a supermarket, the last few days before Christmas. So I will plan for and shop for around two weeks’ worth of meals at that time, and the few perishables that can’t be stored for that time period, we get from the 7Eleven. My sanity is worth it…
I pack my breakfast and lunch the night before and there’s no real planning - I just put together what I can fit in my little cooler. As for dinner, I’m usually thinking about it as I drive home from work. That way, I can stop off at the store if I need something.
For “occasions” or dinner with guests, I may plan as far as a week ahead. I have a fairly respectable array of “tried and true” recipes, but I’ve been known to pull out a cookbook for ideas.
As little as possible.
In the right mood, I like to try new recipes, but the day-to-day feed is something I’d be happier if I could avoid.
When I was working full-time, Mr. OldBroad shared the cooking load, and in fact did >50% of the cooking. To tell the truth, that’s my biggest incentive to find full time work again.
Probably about 10 minutes per week.
I tend to shop around and see what meat/veges are on special and can act as a base for a meal and build around it. Then I sub-catagorise into pasta/tomato/creamy-sauce/baked/grilled/etc for the main meal and a few standard side dishes. Geeky, but it works for me.
Oh, and keep lots of non-perishable items (cans, dried stuff) handy to mix-up the recipes.
I plan during and after shopping, not before. Unless there is s special occasion, in which case I’ll pick something from a recipe book or magazine and shop specifically for that. I’m capable of taking hours over that sort of planning, getting lost in cookbooks, comparing recipes across different books, but that’s part of the fun of special occasion cooking, and is entirely unnecessary.
I read several cooking magazines and have a whole shelf of books. I try out new stuff quite often, though after 25 years of cooking it’s all variations on a theme anyway.
I keep a well-stocked pantry, and the weekly shopping list involves restocking the basics, plus generic things like “fruit”, “green veg”, “meat”, “sandwich fillings” etc. Then I see what’s cheap or on special, and what’s in season, and I plan from there - I think “that looks like good meat for a curry”, or “ooh, cheap roasting pork, that sounds good, must now buy apples for sauce”…
So, after the shopping, I usually spend around half an hour or so deciding on dinners for the week. Then I do all the advance prep I can. I usually clean salad ingredients, and make something to just heat up on Monday after work. I may also marinade meat, or even make and freeze a casserole for later in the week.
Breakfasts and lunches don’t take planning, because they’re basically the same all the time. As long as there’s cereal, fruit, yoghurt, salad, bread and lunch meat of some kind, it’s all set.
I have a process similar to norinew’s. Each week I plan 3-5 meals based on what I have in the pantry and freezer and what’s on sale. I also choose meals to optimize certain ingredients. For example, if a recipe calls for 1/2 of 1 red bell pepper, I find another recipe that will use up the other half. I have a binder with my “tried and true” recipes, and I choose 2-3 meals from there each week. The other 1-2 meals I usually try something new, either from a website or a magazine. Of the meals I choose each week, I try to select at least 1 chicken, 1 “comfort food” for my hubby who likes simple cooking, and the rest either fish or vegetarian. At least two of the meals on the menu should either a casserole, a crockpot dish, or a dish from the freezer so that I too may enjoy the evening. Whenever I make a casserole that freezes well, I make 2 or 3 of them at a time so I can freeze the extras. It’s really just as easy to make 3 lasagnas as 1.
Since I started this method we’ve eaten twice as well for half as much $$$. It does take some time and effort, but only about an hour a week and I have so much less waste and save so much money. Grocery shopping is also much quicker because I have such a comprehensive list.