To Meal-Plan or Not? & DITL (in Our Kitchen Edition)

In all my married years, I have made meal plans. The busyness of homeschool, the complication of minimal convenience in a third-world context… it just always made sense for me to have a meal plan. Grocery stores are less overwhelming if I enter with a plan and a list of ingredients I really need, rather than simply stocking my fridge and cupboards with food that may spoil.

However, I started dreading meal-planning day, feeling like I was running out of ideas for meals and too restricted to a plan. So I was inspired to leave the whole meal planning thing behind for awhile. What would it be like to actually just pull meat out of the freezer and figure it out at supper time?

For those two months, I liked the freedom of this. I never felt like I was failing my plan if we didn’t have the scheduled dinner. Grocery shopping didn’t really change that much, as I found myself generally stocking my shelves and fridge with the same old staple foods.

The drawbacks to not having a plan?

Our lunches became more stressful for me, not because I couldn’t figure out what to make, but because we always went to our default:  tomato and cheese sandwich, or peanut butter. I felt like the healthy options kind of went out the window, because let’s face it, healthy eating requires a certain amount of prep and planning, whether it’s cutting up fresh veggies, preparing for a hearty soup, or soaking lentils or split peas. For me, non-planning turned into last-minute-eating.

I’m sure I could have grown into a rhythm with it, but my personality lends itself to being more comfortable working within the confines of a good plan. My mind can rest, I can think way ahead and do make-ahead preparations in those spare moments, and I feel like we eat much healthier and a larger variety of foods when I have a plan.

Planning lunches and dinners helps us include things I may otherwise forget about - beans on toast, a variety of soups the kids and I like, and eggs! Eggs are great for lunch. My kids are egg pie fanatics.

Hanging our meal plan on the fridge also helps me easily see how I can include the kids in meal prep, or quickly jot down other meal ideas for next week.

Day In the Life (in Our Kitchen edition)

Today started with baking off sourdough loaves. Yum, we love these crusty, rustic, dense loaves of bread.

This No-Knead Sourdough recipe I found works like a charm, and couldn't be easier.

I start it the night before with active starter, mix up the ingredients until there aren't any dry spots in the sticky dough, dump it into a container, cover, and stick it in the fridge. That's it.

In the morning I take it out to quickly form into 2, 8 inch round loaves.

The important part of this method of baking is pre-heating the oven along with the dishes I will bake in. Baking the bread in a covered dish traps the heat and steams the bread, making it puff up, and amazing.

I like to form these loaves and place them in parchment lined bowls. This makes it really easy to transfer them into the scorching hot dishes when everything is preheated.

Into the oven, starting to puff up right away.

While the bread is rising, and oven is preheating, kids are up and getting breakfast. This morning it was toast.

While breakfast was still happening, we got the split peas soaking for lunch.

I also had to strain our milk kefir  - which the kids promptly turned into a blueberry banana smoothie with breakfast!

Last night, I tried a new recipe for tortillas with the sourdough starter. I formed the dough, and set it on the counter to ferment overnight. So at lunchtime today we just rolled them out and they were ready to cook. Wow, they turned out so nice!

Roiboss tea, popular with 3 out of 4 of my kids. I actually don't mind it either as a non-caffeinated option mid-morning....

Supper was meatloaf (which I haven't made in forever) with mashed potatoes and a green salad.