On Daily Meals

Yesterday on Facebook, my friend Andie Becker asked:

I’m so tired of cooking. Hard to find healthy take out or delivery - and it is super expensive to make that a regular habit for a family of five.

What are you doing for easy peasy meals with lots of nutrients and not a lot of hassle?

And my response was:

By far the best thing ever is having someone else do all of the dishes. ALL of the dishes. Pots, pans, prep bowls, the giant cutting board, everything eaten off of and with. Bonus: for the entire day, including meals that I made only for myself. And all with no complaints and only compliments for how great my food has become.

Then early this morning on Twitter, my friend Shawn Powers asked:

I know, my YouTube channel is supposed to be tech stuff. But my brain doesn’t do “one thing” well. ANYWAY, today I was thinking about meal planning. What does YOUR family do?

And I thought... surely this is a good excuse to write something longwinded and tedious about food and cooking and meal planning, which to me is a fairly fascinating subject! It won't fit on Twitter so I'll do it here.

I should start by mentioning that I'm only cooking for two of us. I know in advance how many I'll cook for (two), we don't have random family and friends wandering in and out on a daily basis on short notice, and when we do have friends over for a meal, we usually all get our own takeaways. So, that probably simplifies my life quite a bit. I think that if I did have a large adult/near-adult family with independent schedules, probably I'd just make large volumes of whatever I'm making and then enjoy leftovers if there are any. (This sounds like what Shawn does too, so I guess it must work fairly well).

What has been working great for the two of us, and I'll extoll its virtues at any opportunity: I do all of the cooking and meal planning, and Brett does all of the dishes. And I do mean ALL of them, plus he does a great job at getting things actually clean and ready for the next time I want to use them. It has been amazing for how much more motivated and creative I've been about cooking, to not have to think at all about cleaning up after myself.

Meanwhile, Brett eats everything I make and likes almost all of it. I can tell how much he likes it by whether he goes back for seconds and how much he gets when he does. On the topic of whether it's a bad idea to eat something good too often: I don't personally think so. Especially if you're rotating a lot of different good dishes, so you still get the variety. How it works out for us is, we'll eat a good thing a lot for several weeks until we start getting burnt out on it, and then drop it for a while. A good example is kale. I make a very simple kale edamame salad that takes 10-15 minutes, most of it kale chopping. The first time I did this, it turned out that Brett thinks it's the best thing ever. So for the last couple months, I would buy and cook a new bunch of kale every week. The last batch I made was two weeks ago, the kale was yellowing, and it didn't taste as good as usual, plus I was starting to get tired of doing it, so last week I didn't buy any. I might buy another bunch this week or next. But I suspect that kale season is ending anyhow and we might not do it again until next year.

I should probably also mention that we grocery shop together every week, usually on Saturdays. I figure out what I want to make in the week ahead and get all the ingredients. He buys snacks. >.> Well, a lot of his choices are fruit so I can't complain. In general, I plan to make one big batch of something that will have lots of leftovers, plus odds and ends for one-off meals.

In the regular rotation of big batches of something: beef barley soup, seafood gumbo (there's a recipe two posts down), lasagna, fancied up cottage pie, lentil chili. Probably other things I can't remember. Which one I do depends what I feel like eating and how much effort I feel like putting into it (e.g., beef barley soup contains eight veggies and most of them require chopping), also how much money I feel like spending (big masses of mostly ground beef are expensive here). Occasionally I'll make chicken noodle soup, but Brett doesn't like chicken or noodles so it doesn't feature much in our home meals. Clam chowder occasionally also happens. Pasta and cheese with veggies and a pork-based meat thrown in (Brett is horrified that mac-n-cheese should have anything other than mac and cheese in it though). In general, these dishes are good for at least two or three dinners and several lunches, reducing the total amount of cooking I have to do. I'll make them on a Sunday and then bring it back out again on Tuesday and Friday for example.

In the regular rotation of one-off meals with little to no leftovers:

curries. I rotate between Indian, Japanese, and Thai, all of them as store-bought sauces or pastes. All of them contain onion, potato, carrot, and peas. The protein is usually tofu or frozen shrimp. Usually there's only enough left over for one lunch.

pan-fried white flaky fish in olive oil with garlic, orzo, and some sort of veggie that can be mixed into the orzo such as spinach or frozen mixed veggies.

broiled salmon or sausages, plus kale edamame salad or Random Michelle's risotto, and/or some other carb like mashed potatoes or rice or orzo.

frozen dumplings with podded edamame. They don't really go together other than both are steamed in the same pot (not at the same time).

Pasta, mostly these days with a tomato-based sauce, but occasionally with a cheese-based sauce (out of a jar). Whenever I can find it (and I'm planning to grow some this summer), I use spaghetti squash.

lentils and rice. It usually includes onion, celery, and corn. Seasonings vary, though if I'm lazy it doesn't have anything other than broth, and I like adding hot sauce to it after. This one usually does have lots of leftovers because Brett doesn't like it that much, so I end up eating it for multiple lunches.

I may have lost track of the original question by this point... meal planning! Right, so I usually work out what I want to make for the entire week in advance, and grocery shop accordingly. I try to alternate between rice dishes and not-rice dishes, what kind of protein we're eating (beef or not beef, generally), and vary the veggies. It's easy to get the same eight veggies that are in my beef barley soup and use subsets of those in everything else, but possibly not exciting or nutritionally varied enough.

How do others do it that I know of? There was a family I stayed with when I first moved to New Zealand - as far as I could tell, she did all of the grocery shopping and he did all of the cooking, and he would make stuff up on the spot based on what he found in the fridge. Dinners were two things, a salad and a main dish. (Most of my food can be described as "everything in a single pot.") They are older with grown children who don't live at home anymore though, so probably have established subtleties in that system to make it work well for them (it sure wouldn't for me and Brett).

My parents owned a restaurant. We had our own family fridge spaces and didn't eat the restaurant food most of the time, however. It was usually my mother who cooked for the family, and we had a variety of stir-fried meats and veggies served in the middle of the table, with rice for each person. Brett's mother does all the cooking for his family, and she'll go around asking people to specify whether they'll be present for dinner by X hours beforehand so she knows how much to make. Dinners are generally half a dozen different veggies boiled separately very well, plus a few slices of a roast with gravy. They have fish n chips from a shop on Saturdays.