Calm your days by knowing what's for dinner
Plan a week of meals
Knowing what is for dinner, at least by 10 am but ideally for the whole week, frees you to enjoy being a housewife, frees you from… trying to figure out what’s for dinner, a vexing problem that recurs every day, astonishingly.
Today, to bestow peace on your home, jot down menus for the week. A scrap of paper works fine.
Mondays should be simple (soup and bread, pasta with meat sauce and salad) because it’s a busy day of tasks all around. Fridays we usually have meatless pizza. Sundays I make a roast of some kind so I have materials to work with the following week.
Think about the activities of the week and whether you’ll have time in the kitchen on each day, what you need to use up (don’t let those potatoes rot yet again), and what the family has been hankering for.
Make your list with an extra day built in (so, today, Monday, through Tuesday of next week). That way you can move towards not having to grocery shop on Monday, not the best day.
You can shop today or tomorrow by making a list based on these menus.
On Saturday, I posted about the sourdough sandwich bread we’ve been working on here (scroll down to the Sourdough Corner).
We can start thinking about how to maintain the starter without constant feedings and without any discarding!
To find detailed instructions about how to plan menus that your very own family will enjoy, see this post and these archives and the more organized section in Volume 3 of The Summa Domestica!
Some weeks I do great following your advice but lately have been feeling so weighted down just by the task of writing it down. I took our list of dishes from your brainstorm dump suggestion and printed them on magnet sheets. I have a white board calendar next to the fridge and now I can look at all the meals we like and move the meals over to the calendar. This week already so much less stress.
Take two…
I really struggle with meal planning. We are very seasonal because of the garden and stuff and I find it much more “convenient” (dirty word) to look at what I’ve got on any given day and go from there. And I don’t think about it often until 3pm. I do the same with lunch or have the 14 year old do some culinary practice. I wonder about what women did traditional sometimes as we read the Little Britches series or Little House… How did those women do it. Little Britches was one of 6 and his mother was a widow… I recently watched a video by a farm mom of 7 (I believe) who said she couldn’t meal plan and mitigated her stress by a well stocked larder (with the staples). As I’m filling mine with onions, shallots and potatoes from the garden and fermenting pickles and salsas, salt preserved herbs and oil preserved roasted tomatoes and such I am finding that my stress levels are decreasing. I love eating out of the larder… meal planning was actually part of my Lent penance 😬😬😬