Meal Plan
While reading posts in Google Reader, I often pause on Mary @ Evlogia's posts, finding them relevant to my current life, or inspiring to some future project. (Most things are on hold, now that we are gearing up for a move this month. The assignment is still not official, so that's all I'll say.)
On the Thursday before last week, I read this post and fell head over heels in love with the idea of a seasonal* meal plan. Mary's meal plans repeat each week within the season, so her family eats the same week's meals (no, not like that) from the Sunday of St. Thomas through the Sunday of All Saints. Then, for the Apostles' Fast, they'll eat using a different meal plan—but one which stays the same week to week within that season.
*Liturgical seasons, that is, fasting for fasts, and feasting for festal seasons.
There are not enough superlatives to describe how awesomely wonderful this is to me. I am struggling with eating vegetables, eating nourishing food, eating varied food**, and preparing meals. I want Teddy to have these things be normal to him, but that means I have to work hard at it now. (Okay, I'd like for these things to be normal for me, too, but that's not as inspiring. Teddy is much cuter.)
**My first academic year at ND included about eight months of lunches and dinners based around chicken patties. And I'm not exaggerating.
So I wrote down all the things we like to eat (feasting-wise) which I could think of off the top of my head, and noticed that three of them (hamburgers, tasty Romanian soup, and seven-layer dip) last for more than one meal. Even with that, it was a bit of a struggle to stretch across to a full 14 lunch and dinner meals, with nothing but the main repeating entree ... well, repeating. Fr. Peter chose seven-layer dip because we'd just had a week of soup, and I don't know whether he will want to have seven-layer dip for weeks and weeks, but so far it is MARVELOUS. I made it on Saturday after the yard sale, and—guess what!—lunch was already made for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday!
This past Sunday we were so exhausted from the yard sale that I didn't have time to sit down and grind out a meal plan—BUT I ALREADY KNEW WHAT WE WERE GOING TO EAT BECAUSE I REMEMBERED IT FROM LAST WEEK!
Okay, we have a PTO board meeting, paraklesis, and shopping tonight, and fish is on the menu (my one stretch, even though it's Costco fishsticks for me and salmon burgers with garlic for the more adventurous men), and it takes a while. I just wanted everyone to know how awesome this seasonal* thing is.
Thank you, Mary.
On the Thursday before last week, I read this post and fell head over heels in love with the idea of a seasonal* meal plan. Mary's meal plans repeat each week within the season, so her family eats the same week's meals (no, not like that) from the Sunday of St. Thomas through the Sunday of All Saints. Then, for the Apostles' Fast, they'll eat using a different meal plan—but one which stays the same week to week within that season.
*Liturgical seasons, that is, fasting for fasts, and feasting for festal seasons.
There are not enough superlatives to describe how awesomely wonderful this is to me. I am struggling with eating vegetables, eating nourishing food, eating varied food**, and preparing meals. I want Teddy to have these things be normal to him, but that means I have to work hard at it now. (Okay, I'd like for these things to be normal for me, too, but that's not as inspiring. Teddy is much cuter.)
**My first academic year at ND included about eight months of lunches and dinners based around chicken patties. And I'm not exaggerating.
So I wrote down all the things we like to eat (feasting-wise) which I could think of off the top of my head, and noticed that three of them (hamburgers, tasty Romanian soup, and seven-layer dip) last for more than one meal. Even with that, it was a bit of a struggle to stretch across to a full 14 lunch and dinner meals, with nothing but the main repeating entree ... well, repeating. Fr. Peter chose seven-layer dip because we'd just had a week of soup, and I don't know whether he will want to have seven-layer dip for weeks and weeks, but so far it is MARVELOUS. I made it on Saturday after the yard sale, and—guess what!—lunch was already made for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday!
This past Sunday we were so exhausted from the yard sale that I didn't have time to sit down and grind out a meal plan—BUT I ALREADY KNEW WHAT WE WERE GOING TO EAT BECAUSE I REMEMBERED IT FROM LAST WEEK!
Okay, we have a PTO board meeting, paraklesis, and shopping tonight, and fish is on the menu (my one stretch, even though it's Costco fishsticks for me and salmon burgers with garlic for the more adventurous men), and it takes a while. I just wanted everyone to know how awesome this seasonal* thing is.
Thank you, Mary.
Labels: cooking, diet, family, self-improvement
posted by magda at 3:34 PM
9 Comments:
So happy to know that the meal plan post was helpful to you. Thanks be to God.
I wish I could stick to my meal plans better. I always make them, but I only follow about 50% of what I plan. I hope it continues to go well for you.
I think it's great you can do this. I'm still getting used to the full-time homemaker gig so I'm still floundering around. I'm used to Father having to fix all the lunches for himself and the children and dinner most of the time too. One day, maybe I can be this organized!
Matushka Anna, you make me laugh. Fr. Peter prepares the meals more often than not. That's why "preparing meals" is on my list of things I'm struggling with. I *can* make pasta and salad and garlic toast ... until it's time to. It's rather disappointing how much growing up I still need to do.
You know, when I was a newlywed, I had to call my mother in law to ask her how to bake a potato - no joke. I was too embarassed to call my own mother.
I've gotten better since then. (c;
Yeah. I'm not that advanced yet. When I want to have baked potatoes, I look up what to do on the internet, follow the directions, and wait for my husband to come home to tell me they're undercooked. (Then he nukes them until they're edible.) Growing up, my father was the cook in the house. But I can heat up frozen pizza!
Magda, don't mention pizza on a Friday! Argh! Speaking of which, I have lentil soup on right now. I just posted the recipe.
Sorry. We fast vespers-to-vespers rather than midnight-to-midnight (Orthodox *and* geeky), so we do have pizza on Friday nights.
I used to persuade my husband to make vegan pizza from scratch, but it was usually gone too quickly to make that much effort (all his, but still) worthwhile.
Sigh. We never got a blessing to do that. Not that we didn't try. It was hard to give up the Friday night pizza habit when we converted! Now we do it Saturday most of the time.
Post a Comment
<< Home