The first part of the new year I found myself getting a little bored with cooking dinner. It seemed like I was making the same old meals week after week. I was having a conversation with some friends and was inspired to get back to planning our menus. This is not the first time I've been in a "dinner rut." And it seems that every time I find myself in such a rut, it coincides with an extended period where I've haven't taken the time to plan our dinners ahead of time.
So I began by listing all the main dishes that we eat and enjoy. I divided them into categories such as Pasta/Pizza, Chicken, Beef, Soup/Stews, Mexican, Meatless/Beans, and an Other category that included fish and other meats and anything that didn't fit anywhere else. Then I listed all of our side dishes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that we eat over sixty different main courses at our house. Not all of them are the absolute favorites of every member of the family, but nothing made it onto my list that wasn't a basically well received and eaten by everyone.
I then was set to plan the first week of dinners. We've been doing this for a month now and I'm happy to say that my boredom is over. We haven't had a repeat dinner yet, other than the two Friday nights when we were out and about and just had ham sandwiches and veggie sticks. I'm having fun cooking things that we haven't had in a long time.
Tonight we had chicken pot pie…family style. I cooked chicken in broth in the crockpot most of the day, shredded it up mid afternoon and thickened it with some flour and seasoned it. Then close to dinnertime I added cooked veggies to the chicken and gravy and made up a batch of baking powder biscuit dough. I filled the glass baking dish with the chicken mixture, rolled the dough into a large rectangle and plopped it on top. "Easy peazy, nice and cheesy!!" as my kids would say. I baked it for half an hour until the biscuit top was nice and brown, we made a green salad to go with it and dinner was served. It wasn't a difficult meal, but it did take planning because I had to get that chicken going in the crockpot first thing in the morning. But because I had a plan, I knew in advance what would be needed. When I wait until 4:00 in the afternoon to decide on dinner, I can't do a dinner like this. So we end up with the same old, same old.
The kids too, love to look up on the fridge and see my weekly dinner plan, especially the hungry teenage boys! They dream about dinner all day when it is a favorite like chimichangas or spaghetti. And if they happen to see a night where there is a dinner that is not their favorite (like lentil soup night…which happens to be one of my favorite soups), they can look ahead to the next day when a favorite may appear again. I also find that my girls look at the plan and volunteer to help with dinners that they deem "fun" to learn how to cook.
Tomorrow night is minestrone. I'm thinking one of the kids would probably love to make breadsticks to go with it!!
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