Saving Dinner: Week 1

I work full-time, Todd works full-time, and we have a 15 month old child. When we get home in the evening, we're all tired and hungry, and the baby is very very angry. Too often, we haven't planned anything for dinner, and so we spend five to ten minutes staring into the pantry, glassy-eyed and mouthbreathing, before we either a) make tacos or b) go out. Other weeks, we end up running to grocery store nearly every night on the way home to pick up an ingredient, because we didn't plan a menu out prior to shopping on the weekend. It's not that we don't like to cook, or that we don't know how - we just suck at planning and, honestly, we're kind of lazy.

Of course, that laziness is costing us time and money, and when we eat out we're not eating healthy foods. When we're at a restaurant, I have a hard time finding food I want Micah to eat, because most of it is terrible for him, especially the vegetables. Then that starts me thinking, well, if I won't give it to him, why am I eating it? We knew we should cook at home, and we really were trying, but we obviously needed a better system.

A while back (a VERY long while back), my mother gave us a copy of Saving Dinner. It's a book that plans out menus for a week at a time, compiles the shopping lists, offer tips on how to speed up the process by doing certain steps ahead of time....and basically removes all excuses for not cooking at home. The book has been collecting dust on the shelf with all the other cookbooks lo these many years, until I happened to drag it out Saturday. After quickly determining that Micah wasn't interested in waiting for us to compile our own menus and shopping list, we decided to just go ahead and give it a shot.

Last night we started off the week's menu, and dinner was fantastic. We already know what we're eating tonight and all the ingredients are on hand. That's a huge change right there. The first spouse home can start on dinner, without our usual phone calls of "what are we having? did you take anything out to thaw? can you stop by and pick up _____?" Just having a plan is a relief. And if tonight's meal taste as good as last night's, we'll be in good shape!

Hopefully, this is a plan we will actually stick to. We'll see how it goes.