Suppertime, Suppertime, Sup sup suppertime...
Posted March 22nd, 2008 by cewhite
Recently, there was a question about setting up the dinnertime routine... and I thought I would start a thread over here for further exploration of the topic.
The earlier post got me thinking that there are many ways to do go about scheduling dinners in Life Balance. There are many ways to think about mealtime. And dinner itself poses a lot of possibilities. Quiet dinners at home, meal planning, grocery shopping, healthful eating, fancy entertaining and holiday feasts.
What are your challenges for putting supper on the table?
Where to begin?
--Catherine--*
Comments
Hi Catherine, I think the
Hi Catherine,
I think the primary challenge is to both know what to cook and have the necessary ingredients on hand when it's time to start. My wife and I handle this with a comprehensive weekly shopping trip (primarily my job), preceded by the making of a grocery list (also my job), in turn preceded by the choosing of recipes (primarily my wife's job), which is itself preceded by a brief chat about what we want to eat that week and what perishable ingredients we have left over from last week.
My wife pulls most recipes from either the internet, printing them out, or from a fat 3-ring binder we keep adding to. She chooses about 5 recipes per week -- the other two days we're likely to go out, eat leftovers or toss together something so simple and routine that we don't need to plan for it. The week's stack of recipes gets placed in a kitchen drawer near the prep area, on top of the towels and oven mitts. When it's time to make dinner, either of us can go to that drawer, make an easy choice of what to cook, and be confident we have everything we need to cook it. Somewhere along the line we make notes about unclear directions, changes in technique and whether we liked each recipe. Eventually the recipes get filed in the binder for future re-use.
This has all become so routine that we don't need digital prompts to remember what to do next, but it did take a while to arrive at this system. I suspect LB might me most useful as a sort of learn-to-feed-myself training aid.
And some variations...
We do something that may be a New England, winter wonderful thing, which is that we have a pantry. It isn't big, but I keep it pretty organized by foodstuff. So I can tell at a glance, that we need two cans of diced tomaters.
The pantry check, is the first stage of the grocery list, then we usually try to cook two double recipes over the weekend - but that is fairly close to your 5 recipe mark. We may have a higher tolerance for leftovers. :-)
Sometimes we bake and freeze something lovely for breakfast, too like muffins, or corn bread or something like that.
I find that my slow cooker is becoming a major piece of cooking equipment because we can cook up a big pot of gumbo, or stew, and then portion it out into meals for the rest of the week. We started cooking specifically for leftovers, that we portion out, and freeze rather than keeping in the fridge, where we are more likely to get tired of them.
I think that for the routine daily kind of cooking, that the careful creation of the list for the weekly routine for grocery shopping is the crucial component. There are whole aisles of the grocery store that I skip too, because I do cook.
I read a helpful book about that called "The Once a Week Cooking Plan" by Joni Hilton. The techniques are adaptable to other recipes. If I get tired of that style of cooking, I make something very fresh with a special trip to the grocery store to pick out just the ingredients for that day. Our grocery store day is often "sushi" day, if we go in the evening, and won't have time to cook after the grocery shopping.
I have a few cookbooks that I lean on heavily in summer, and a different set for winter. Hmm. My cravings tend to be pretty seasonal even when foods are available year round.
But I wonder about the people out there throwing lavish dinner parties.... and how can we get invited? Kidding!
:-)
Actually, I suspect I will need to invite some friends over for dinner soon... and I've nearly forgotten how that's done! So what about dinner parties, banquets? Movie night popcorn bashes? :-)
How often? How many people? What kind of social life dinner partying is doable at the end of a long workweek, if any?
Best wishes,
--Catherine--*
Dinner parties
We do some of these. Our tiny house imposes a cold-weather limit of about six people around the table. Summertime opens up the porch and yard so those gatherings can be larger, but usually aren't. Many of these are very spontaneous, suggested and put together within a few hours (or less) and involving friends who live nearby. We also have a group that gets together once a month for a potluck, with a theme agreed on well ahead of time. Past themes have included fondue, soup, north African food, and Oktoberfest. This month we'll be celebrating Seder together, even though half of us are gentiles. In any case, informality makes the parties much more manageable.
A few years ago we also participated in a neighborhood cheese club. The woman who administered it arranged a sort of monthly subscription to an assortment of exotic cheeses, shipped from a city that stocked fancier cheeses than could be had locally. We'd pay our dues, and a couple of weeks later we'd be invited to a sort of come-get-your-cheese-and-have-a-cocktail party. Sadly, the club fell apart when the woman who ran it moved away.
We have a similar system
Next to LifeBalance, my favorite software is Mastercook. It comes loaded with thousands of recipes and I have about 10 years of Cooking Light recipes on it as well (from an old version). Every week, usually Sunday, I scan through the lists of menus I've created from our favorite recipes. With the click of a mouse I have a complete shopping list, sorted by grocery type. I compare to what we have in the pantry and check off what we need. I print it out and give it to my dear husband who actually enjoys grocery shopping. All the recipes are kept in a bulging notebook - finally all in sheet protectors because we're messy cooks. I think a lot of sites online now give you the ability to select recipes and create shopping lists.
With the last version of palm, Mastercook let me export to Splashshopper. Unfortunately, that isn't available any more.
The only thing I have in LB is the reminder "make weekly shopping list" which usually isn't a big deal.
Along the lines of cooking though, I also have the weekly to-do "bake cookies" which happens any day I have time, and "bake bread" which I'd like to do more often, but I put it off because it's time consuming. But nothing tastes better than fresh homemade bread. Maybe I'll have to make some today. . .