We hope that everybody has been staying safe and is staying cool in this California heat.
Like most of us, I had such hopes that I would use this time of quarantine productively, especially when it came to cooking. It may surprise you to know that while Jeff and I plan and create meals for a living (and miss doing so very much!), we have never been the type to meal-plan for our own personal meals. Our clients are often surprised to learn that after we leave a catering event, we are so ready to get home and go to bed that we often will be found in the Wendy’s drive-through on our way home. This is partly because we are tired and don’t want to grocery shop and cook for ourselves, and also partly because we just love Wendy’s chicken nuggets.
So, we took this time to focus on meal-planning for ourselves. We want to limit the amount of trips to the grocery store that we are making, but we also want to use the free time that we have to be more creative in the kitchen and make meals that we might otherwise not have the time to do. Interestingly, both Jeff and I have found this to be challenging.
Jeff is a much more experienced cook than I am, and he is able to look in the refrigerator and pantry and create a meal based on ingredients we already have; however, as we have been going to the grocery store less frequently, we just have fewer groceries on hand. This has made his preferred method of creating a meal more challenging because he has fewer choices to work with.
Anybody who knows me knows that I am a rule-follower. This personality trait carries over to my cooking style—I want to have a recipe that tells me exactly what I am to do. I am comfortable enough in the kitchen to substitute out ingredients that I don’t like or ones to make a recipe healthier, but I still need to have the basic ingredients to feel comfortable making a recipe. This has stifled my cooking abilities, especially for recipes that call for fresh ingredients. I will buy the fresh produce that I need for one meal, but I won’t use it all up. I then have been struggling to find another recipe that will use the produce that I have leftover, but will also not require me to go back to the store to get additional ingredients.
I know some of you are reading this rolling your eyes and have easy solutions for these problems. Please let me know if you do!!
All of this is to say that Jeff and I found ourselves in a cooking rut. Our freezer and pantry were full and disorganized, and our fridge comprised an assortment of random produce and leftover meals. So, Jeff and I decided to tackle both of those problems, while helping our cooking rut: we would clean and organize both the fridge, the freezer and the pantry AND we could only use what we found to make our dinners. That way, we would use up what we already had, saving money and eliminating the need to go to the grocery store.
Although this was much easier for Jeff, who, remember, can look at ingredients and envision a meal, it was also fun for me to experiment and combine some recipes that I had mastered already. Now, when we make our grocery list for the week, we first look at what we already have in the house and plan meals based off of that. I can then step into the kitchen to cook dinner and know that I have everything that I need. I realize that some of you have probably been doing this all along, but, hey, we are learning!
Another thing that we have been doing is looking at the week and choosing who will make dinner which nights and writing that down on a calendar in the kitchen. This helps to share the responsibility of cooking and also creates some structure, which makes creating grocery lists much easier—Jeff knows the days he is responsible for and can plan meals based on that and vice versa. We will then share our meal ideas to make sure there is no overlap (i.e. we each plan to make tacos that week. That’s a bad example though, because you can never have too many tacos). We have also built in leftovers nights, which has been helpful in eliminating food waste and also gives us each a guaranteed day off from cooking.
Hopefully these tips help any of you who are similarly feeling like you are in a cooking rut. Please feel free to reach out with any other hints for meal planning, recipes, etc. I would love to hear them!
Stay safe and hopefully we can get back to catering soon!
-Kathy