These days, there’s no reason meal planning should be tough, even for vegetarians and vegans.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve got tons of cookbooks and nearly infinite recipes at our fingertips on the web, not to mention all of the loose ideas of meals in our heads.<\/p>\n
So why is it so hard to answer the question, \u201cWhat do you want for dinner tonight?\u201d Or, even harder, to sit down over the weekend and actually plan out — gasp!<\/em> — seven dinners?<\/p>\n Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity.<\/p>\n –Jack White (of the White Stripes)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Austin Kleon\u2019s book Steal Like an Artist<\/em><\/a> (where I found the Jack White quote), Kleon relates a story about Dr. Seuss that really hit home for me. First as a writer, and later as a cook.<\/p>\n As Kleon tells it, Dr. Seuss wrote the classic The Cat in the Hat<\/em> with only 236 different words. For a kids\u2019 book, maybe this doesn\u2019t seem like so small a number, but if you think back to all the stuff that happens in that book — mom leaving, cat coming, chaos ensuing, Thing 1, Thing 2, the balancing act, the goldfish, the cleanup, mom coming back…) — 236 is tiny.<\/p>\n In response, Dr. Seuss\u2019 editor bet him that he couldn\u2019t write a book with 50 different words or less. Of course, Dr. Seuss won the bet — and in the process, he created Green Eggs and Ham<\/em>, one of the bestselling children\u2019s books of all time.<\/p>\n Kleon goes on:<\/p>\n The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a song on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don\u2019t make excuses for not working—make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Okay, so planning your meals isn\u2019t exactly high art. Or writing kids’ books. But we can learn something from Dr. Seuss and from Kleon\u2019s advice.<\/p>\n At the beginning of the year I wrote a post called 7 Ways to Simplify Your Meal Planning<\/a>. The most valuable tip there was #4:<\/p>\n When you\u2019re having trouble choosing a recipe, pick just one ingredient to narrow your options.<\/strong><\/p>\n This little shift has made choosing what to cook so easy. When you don\u2019t know what to make for dinner, don\u2019t just head for the cookbook shelf, where you know you\u2019ll leaf around aimlessly and eventually get frustrated that nothing sounds good, wishing you had just one new cookbook.<\/p>\n Instead, find the best thing you have in your refrigerator (or if you\u2019ve got nothing, pick a vegetable at random or one that you know is in season). If that alone doesn\u2019t jog your memory of a favorite recipe you haven\u2019t cooked in ages, open a cookbook and head to the index to find the recipes that include your chosen ingredient.<\/p>\n Just as Dr. Seuss\u2019 50-word limitation pulled Green Eggs and Ham<\/em> out of his head, so can your starting point of \u201ceggplant\u201d get you to create Pasta alla Norma<\/em><\/a>. (You can make it green, if you get off on that sort of thing.)<\/p>\n For one-off meals, when you need to get some food on the table tonight, this is great. But what about actual planning — as in, planning ahead<\/em>?<\/p>\n I\u2019m finally starting to realize how bad it is to go to the grocery store every day. I tend to fall into the trap of not deciding what to make for dinner until just a few hours prior, at which point I hurriedly leaf through my cookbooks or scan websites until I find something that looks good. Then I go to the store, then I come home and cook it, eat it, and clean up. It’s a three-hour process, even with the “pick an ingredient” trick.<\/p>\n I’ve rationalized it by saying that I enjoy it, that it makes me feel like I’m on Top Chef. But in truth, it’s the result of procrastination, and nothing else.<\/p>\n Besides something that takes up an inordinate amount of your day, failing to plan your meals in advance is:<\/p>\n Moral of the story: Plan your meals in advance, on the weekend, and go shopping for it all in one trip. If freshness is an issue and you’re worried about spoilage, go twice weekly. No more, unless you’re Mario Batali.<\/p>\n The question, though, is how. Even when I know I should plan ahead, I still don’t. The reason, I think, is because planning meals is hard. There are too many choices and it takes too much time, especially when you combine it with shopping.<\/p>\n First: plan your meals on a separate day than you go shopping. Breaking the task up like this just makes it easier to face. So if you shop every Sunday, plan every Saturday.<\/p>\n But how can you use the pick-an-ingredient trick to plan an entire week’s worth of meals? Thinking up seven ingredients, one for each meal, takes a lot of time in itself.<\/p>\n Here’s the trick: only do that part once. Pick seven ingredients, one time — say, at the beginning of each month — that will form the template for your weekly menu. Pick ingredients that are in-season, or that form a nice mix of nutrients, or that you just want to eat more of. And each week, come meal-planning time, all you’ve got to do is match meals to your seven ingredients.<\/p>\n For example, you might say that once a week you’ll eat tempeh or tofu, if you’re not opposed to soy<\/a> (I’m not, in that small quantity). Another night you’ll make a lentil dish. A pasta dish. A meal based on the heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market. And so on.<\/p>\n With that in place, so much of the work is done. Throughout the week, as you come across recipes on the web or elsewhere, you’ll recall the ones that fit with your plan, and you’ll actually make them instead of squirreling them away in that recipes folder that you never remember to use.<\/p>\n But it can be so much more than just ingredients. Here are a few other ideas to help you plan your weekly template:<\/p>\n Ethnicity.<\/strong> Say you’ll cook Indian food one night, Italian another, Thai another. I’d list more, but those are about the only types of food I eat. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Nutrition.<\/strong> Focus one day on getting a high-protein or complete-protein meal<\/a>. (Side note: the idea of combining proteins<\/a> into meals is coming back into scientific vogue.) Another day make sure you get a lot of a certain amino acid<\/a> (lysine, for example) that’s not always easy to get. Get some good iron<\/a> sources another night. (Note: I’d probably only use this in combination with another method, like making a protein-focused meal your seventh meal when using one of the other methods, if protein is a big concern for you.)<\/p>\n New diets.<\/strong> Let’s say you’re vegetarian but not vegan. You could make one night a vegan night, the way omni’s do with Meatless Monday. Make one day gluten-free, and one day raw, if these seem interesting to you. This is a nice way to experience these diets without fully committing yet.<\/p>\n To give you an example, here\u2019s the template my wife and I came up with for this week. We’ll stick with it for a month (but this week’s menu is shortened because we have visitors coming on Friday and we\u2019ll eat out a few days).<\/p>\n And here are the meals we planned to fit our constraints (in about 10 minutes over the weekend):<\/p>\n So there you have it! No longer is there an excuse not to plan your meals, and no reason to dread the process either. Pick a few ingredients or types of dishes as your template, spend 15 or 20 minutes on Saturday, and shop on Sunday. You’ll be healthier, richer, and happier for it.<\/p>\n And you’ll be an artist. Whenever someone asks you to do something, just remind them of that, and they’ll understand that you can’t be bothered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These days, there’s no reason meal planning should be tough, even for vegetarians and vegans. We\u2019ve got tons of cookbooks and nearly infinite recipes at our fingertips on the web, not to mention all of the loose ideas of meals in our heads. So why is it so hard to answer the question, \u201cWhat do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":32279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe problem: We have too many choices<\/h3>\n
So what\u2019s this have to do with dinner?<\/h3>\n
But there\u2019s still one problem<\/h3>\n
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The solution<\/h3>\n
My menu this week<\/h3>\n
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