Stinkerpants

Meal Planning: Getting Organized

January 4, 2012 in Parenthood & Life • Cooking • Personal Projects • How To

Well hello, all! Fancy meeting you here in 2012!

Who else is ready for a fresh new year?! I am. I spent the last three weeks of 2011 binging on chocolate cake, cheese and chicken pot pies, and now I’m ready to give up dairy, for realsies.

I also spent those last three weeks assembling a bunch of recipes and meal ideas so that we have a higher chance of eating in instead of eating out. I’m hoping that these meals will be good enough to share with you guys. In the meantime, I'm going to share how I've prepped with you!

Just as a refresher, all of our meals are:

• Fast. 30 minutes or less, better yet 15 minutes or less.
• Completely dairy-free and usually gluten-free as well. If it’s not completely gluten-free, it’s something like falafel that can be served to C without the pita. The meals are also low in soy content because C is sensitive to soy. I am not a huge fan of meat, so some of the meals are completely vegan – but those have been harder to find. Our diet most closely resembles the paleo diet. 
• Contain whole foods – I really try not to cook with any processed foods, which I find is common with vegan meals. We aren't cooking with meat or dairy alternatives.
• Tasty.

I must say, figuring out ideas for meals has not been easy. Most “fast” recipes contain dairy and gluten, and most vegan recipes aren’t fast (and sometimes contain gluten or soy). Thank god for the paleo nuts out there (love you guys), because I've gotten a lot of inspiration from them.

Here's what I've done to prep.

Step 1: Find New Recipes (and hide my old favorites)

In doing research for this endeavor, I realized I needed to split my recipes into three parts: 1) Regular meals (which take some preparation, like veggie chopping or marinating), 2) Insanely fast meals (made from stuff on hand), and 3) Freezer meals (which may take a lot of time, but make enough for many meals). My plan is to make a different freezer meal every couple of weeks. Most of our nightly meals will be from the "Insanely Fast" category, and maybe one or two will be regular meals.

I found most of our new recipes by googling incessantly. I still haven't tried a lot of the meals I've found, so if there are especially good ones, I'll point y'all toward them as we try them. 

In the meantime, here are a few resources I found very helpful:

• Go Dairy Free (I've had the book for months - at first I didn't read it, because there are a lot of words for a not particularly interesting subject - but once I actually started reading it, it was by far the most helpful resource!).
• This list of 101 Quick Meals is awesome. Quite a few are dairy/gluten-free, vegetarian, etc. It's worth a glance, whatever your restrictions (or lack thereof).
• Cooking for Isaiah was recommended by one of my readers (thanks Caryn!)
• This gluten-free, dairy-free bread recipe is delish. It's the first bread C's ever had and she loves it!

Step 2: Organize Recipes

I printed out all of the recipes I found online, plus photocopied recipes from books. I know myself, and I know I won't look in those cookbooks! Then I took some file folders and sorted them: Insanely Fast, Regular Meals, and Freezer meals. I stored them in an acrylic recipe book holder (pictured below are actually my old folders - I've been using this method for awhile):

Step 3: Print Out a Quick Guide to Each Section

I created a new Word doc for each section, then simply listed the contents of each folder. This way, I can see at a glance what's in each folder without having to search through it. I also created a list of quick snacks (tortilla chips & salsa, hummus, carrot sticks, etc) for when I'm hungry and don't know what to eat. I don't do well with keeping stuff in my head these days - everything must be written down.

As an aside: the other thing I realized is that, once I start acquiring freezer meals, I'm going to need a white board that says what's in the freezer, or we'll never see it again (let alone eat it). This will also be useful for snacks. The less remembering/thinking, the better, I say. Let's reserve the thinking for world peace (or at least for remembering where we left our keys).

Step 4: Plan the Meals

Next, I printed out three months worth of calendars (I did this using iCal, but I'm sure you could figure out a way to do this another way). At this point, I was surprised how easy it was! I just filled in recipes for 5 days each week. At the beginning of each week, I'll compile a shopping list for the items I've listed, and I'm done! So far, so good! 

One day, I'd really like to get good at the whole "I cooked a pot of beans on Sunday, and I made 5 meals from them!" thing. But for now, I'm just going to try cooking anything, and go from there!

What do you think? Is this method sustainable?