foodins

This upcoming week looks to be a busy week, given that it’s my last week at my current job and we’re flying out to Idaho on Friday night for back to back family reunions. Definitely a week to schedule in some leftovers for meals.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s meal plan:

Sunday: My Birthday dinner at Carousel

Well this is interesting.

Foodieview is, among other things, a recipe search engine that allows you to search across multiple different recipe sites at once.  It targets all favorite sites - The Food Network, Martha Stewart, Epicurious, and many others. 

I've just found an article on Real Simple's website that reviews six different meal planning services.   The basic idea of these services is that each week (or each month) they put together a meal and email it to you to make during the following week (or month).  They generally provide you with a shopping list and instructions that'll help if you want to freeze the prepared, pre-cooked dinners for the upcoming month.

So, I've taken a look at Meals Matter, and although I really like the idea, there are a few features that I'd love to have integrated before I'd actually use it. 

1.  Ability to remove meals for which I don't want to plan.  I have no need to plan for breakfast or lunch, even on the weekends.  These meals just clutter up the UI and make the plan less clear for me. 

My friend Liz just sent over a link to an interesting online meal planning service called Meals Matter.  It looks like it could be quite useful, especially when used in conjunction with the new Nokia web tablet I received in the mail a few days ago. 

Meal planning tends to be a multi-step affair for me.  I’ve documented my current process below.  As I did this, I started wondering if this is one of the reasons why I sometimes “fall off the wagon” and don't plan my meals for the week as I'd like to.

It’s a task that can take up to an hour at times, and perhaps the perceived time commitment makes me procrastinate. Now that I’ve documented it, I’m going to try to see if there are any parts of the process that can be streamlined and made easier.

In any case, here is my current process:

Here's a picture of our dinner today.
- Middle Eastern Chicken recipe from Epicurious
- Cous cous
- Asparagus

Henry and I don't use normal cookbooks, since even before we started working for a Major Search Engine we stopped being able to make analog searches anymore. Yellow Pages? Pshaw. Dictionary? That’s so 1928.

Here is my first posted Menu Plan of the blog, for the week of June 25 - June 30.

This is a strange week, as we have a ton of birthdays and family visits going on. Our normal weekly goal will be to eat dinner in more often than this.

Sunday
* Dining out - Moroccan!*

Monday
Entree: Leftovers buffet
Vegetable: Salad
Dessert: Fresh cherries

Tuesday
Entree: Middle Eastern Chicken
Vegetable: Asparagus
Dessert: Fruit cup

This blog is not the beginning of the habits that we've tried to put in place to help us get food on the table - it's merely an extension of them. As part of this, I'm documenting our existing "Ground Rules" in electronic text with the hopes that seeing them in writing will encourage us to follow them more regularly.

GROUND RULES

1. Meal planning shall be done on Saturday.