Meal Planning

[Gaelbert]

I get a box of produce and meat every Friday and it's made me want to take a less laissez faire attitude towards meal planning.

Friday: Finished off the last of a very large pot roast I had made earlier in the week, served it on rice.

Saturday: Fried shrimp and fried goat cheese fritters with a mango salad. Was blizzarding quite hard outside so I wanted to try something not too winter-y. Goat cheese turned out perfect (when drizzled with honey), but I botched the batter on the shrimp. Folks said they liked it but the batter was way too heavy for my liking and I'll continue to work out a better flour blend.

Sunday: Had company over so I made a ton. Roasted mushrooms stuffed with a tuna salad, rice, and poached chicken in a coconut milk, Sichuan pepper, and fish sauce broth. Served on rice. Was nice at the end of the meal to pour the broth on the rice with a little mango, basically a desert at that point.

Monday: Shepherd's pie with ground beef and chicken. Took way longer to make than I had anticipated, tasted good for a first attempt and was quite filling. Next time I'll just be using one type of meat to cut down on prep time. 2 was overkill.

Tuesday: Soup. Just throwing in all my leftover produce that I won't be able to cook. Carrots, greens, leeks, some sort of root veggie, in a mushroom and chicken bone broth.

Wednesday: All be all by my lonesone so probably just finishing off leftover soup and shepherd's pie.

Thursday: Stacked enchiladas.

Don't normally plan out lunches or breakfasts because those are almost always oatmeal/leftovers but I had a lovely spam and pineapple fried rice for breakfast on Saturday, a cauliflower bake for lunch Sunday, and baked a couple of apple coffee cakes along the way.
Looking over the week, seems like I have way more meat on the menu than usually. It's been snowy outside and cold weather makes me turn towards my meats and carbs.

What does everyone in the playground have cooking this week? Would love to hear some new ideas.

[TechnOkami]

This might be my personal opinion, but soup is, like, the best thing. You make a lot of it in one go, you can pull from it as a resource, it's hot, it's easy to cook, just, God DAMN I love soup!

Then there's the classic sandwich I guess, that + soup is to die for.

[~Corvus~]

At there with Okami. The best soups are the ones I make for ~40 people. Then we store the rest in plastic tubs and have leftovers, and when I don't feel like cooking we can do tuna melts / cheese melts and SOUP!!

[Artemis97]

I like things that can be stretched into multiple meals. Pulled pork is especially good. Make it in a slow cooker, serve it up on some hamburger rolls. Next night, have it in tacos. I like it on nachos too. Was great when I was cooking for myself in my dorm. I also like mashed potatoes, because hey who doesn't? but leftovers are good for shepherd's pie topping. Taco meat also stretches pretty well. Always have leftovers of that.

[Kid Jake]

Tonight I made Stromboli.

Wednesday: General Tso's Chicken, Chicken Fried Rice and Egg Rolls.

Thursday: Burritos. Everyone in the family has different tastes so I'll whip up a variety of fixings and let them build their own at the table. For mine at least: fried beef smothered in onions and peppers, fried potatoes, beans and rice, guacamole, queso, a smidge of sour cream and enough hot sauce to choke a horse.

Friday: Hamburger Helper. I love to cook, but for some reason my four year old niece is obsessed with boxed meals and the only thing she requests every week is Hamburger Helper so I'll take the night off and go the easy route. I might fry up some doughnuts or something for afterwards out of boredom.

Saturday: Some kind of Hamburger. I've had a hankering for a while for one with A-1 Sauce and homemade onion rings, so if the snow melts by Saturday I'll whip out the grill. if not, I'll rig something else up.

Sunday: Grocery day. I tell everyone to fend for themselves and abandon them for the day, stumbling in at 2am with an armful of groceries for the coming week.

[Cristo Meyers]

We don't tend to go full-on from scratch very often. Usually something is out of a box or otherwise premade, but we make do.

We found a really nice sous-vide roast beef. Just a little bland, but that's fixable. Heat up, season, put on toasted bread with cheese on top. Won't fool a Philly native, but it's good enough for us. Another was a heat-n-eat fajita kit that turned out way better than it had any right to be.

Before that was a really good lamb and barley stew. Most of the time soups and stews don't hold up to multiple meals for us, something invariably goes bad or squishy or otherwise unappetizing, but this... damn. Even with the lamb getting a little burned. We might do chili at some point: mostly because A) my wife's is really good and b) I love tormenting everyone at work with it. The fact that no one believes me when I tell them it was made in 45 minutes in a microwave is just a bonus.

I almost always pre-make my lunches for the week, but it's usually something really simple: some kind of protein + some kind of veggie. Though this week is a spicy chicken with lentils because we never got out to get any fresh produce.

[factotum]

Mostly my stuff is either microwaved or pre-made stuff--e.g. I have the second half of a chili con carne in the freezer, but it was made using a jar of chili con carne sauce and some minced beef. About the only thing I've made from scratch this week is my version of those mixers you can buy that you're supposed to mix in with cooked pasta--in my case, a can of tomatoes, sliced salami, and spices, heated on the hob while the pasta boils and then mixed in with the drained pasta at the end.

I used to have stews quite often, and those will last me about 3 days when I do have them, but nowadays I don't usually have the time to cook them because I have my main meal in the middle of the day--I'd have to be preparing the stew and getting it on the simmer at breakfast time, and I generally can't be bothered.

[TechnOkami]

I should mention that I also enjoy making Risotto since I know HOW to make it (and taking the long way to make it without any shortcuts just leaves it tasting oh so good), and I also like using miso paste to make Miso Soup and... uh... pasta is a simple enough thing to cook, but not fulfilling on its own. I've actually found that a Big Salad (lettuce/spring mix of choice + baby tomatoes + beets + carrots + croutons + olives + boiled egg bits + chickpeas) to be a good inclusion with a main meal of some kind.

I dunno, I just like good food. :smalltongue:

[AMFV]

I think the most important thing in meal planning is pretty much the same thing that's most critical in planning anything. A defined set of goals, otherwise you kind of wind up flailing around, at least in my experience. Although to be fair 99.99% of my meal planning involves tolerating making myself completely miserable, so it's a different kind of planning. But in any case, I think that goals are still important. Do you want more elaborate meals? More varied meals? To sample food from different areas? (I personally love trying to recreate foods from different parts of the world).

As for what I'm having this week, it's pretty miserable, I'm kind of a Keto weeklong thing to recover from a business trip where my diet wasn't as on-par as it should be. So it's a lot of cheese this week, and a few other meat related things. Probably today will be only that (which isn't super healthy, but in the short term it'll help me ditch the two or four lbs of water I'm holding, which will help me in life). I should be back on track by next week though, then I'll post something more interesting and involved.