Meal planning always seems a sort of math problem to me, the dreaded algebra equation with its silly “unknown” letters.
I wasn’t always so dismissive of mathematics. Elementary school was a one room country schoolhouse, just like you read about in Little House on the Prairie. In fact, the school was called Prairie Grove, and I can remember concentrating hard on reciting the multiplication tables while a cruel north breeze swept across the wood floor. It was good to sit with your feet curled up under you at your desk, even if it meant they fell asleep! At home as homework, I paced while I learned those tables, and then I used little memory jogs to keep the math in my head, always feeling quite secure that I was correct, because I could always go back and count it up to see if I’d been right. In the fall of 1963, when I began my freshman year at the rural high school at Bern in Kansas—big, big happenings for me!—algebra entered my life, and I never felt the same way about math again. I do remember liking what was called Geometry then, mostly because you just had to memorize the formula and the solution made a nice, pretty shape, but I was quite happy to skip any math for my junior and senior years in high school. This was a rural school, so practically everyone took band and chorus, and I was the only one who could play the piano well enough to accompany the boys’ chorus, so I never took the next levels of math or chemistry—sigh. Happy Days! It was quite a shock to be placed in a remedial algebra class when I started college, but the graduate student teacher/tutor was impressed by my ability to traipse across campus, again in cold, cruel winds, to get help, and he probably gifted me by passing me, and then I NEVER DID MATH AGAIN! Yay!
Still, you can look at meal planning as that sort of formula where multiple solutions depend upon multiple probabilities. You’ve got your basic food groups located in those three different places: the fridge, the freezer, and the pantry. And the affecting probabilities are how much time you want to spend cooking and what you feel like doing vs. what you’d like to be eating at the end of the process. Let’s just analyze food groups this time, since these various permutations invite long discussion!
There are 6. I don’t care what the USDA Food Pyramid says. There are six food groups, and at Supper time, all six have to appear in the meal. (Lunch and breakfast count only as additions for the day, not as accumulating “credits.”) Those food groups are protein, a green vegetable, a satisfying vegetable starch or bread, another vegetable, a fruit, and. . .chocolate. When I plan, I think of which things in each group I’m willing to eat and how much effort is required to produce each.
Here’s my working list, with every element reduced to the simplest cooking method. Yours will obviously be different, because I’ll bet you’re willing to eat things like fish and Swiss chard and even—(shudder)—kale. Good for you!
Protein – chicken breast, roasted; pork chop, beef and pork tenderloin, sautéed stovetop; Hillshire Farm sausage; eggs; toasted walnuts, pecans, pumpkin or sunflower seeds; lentils.
Green vegetable – broccoli, blanched (See #3 – The green jewel, broccoli) or roasted; green beans, delightfully fresh from the farmers’ market in the summertime and frozen French cut, otherwise; romaine lettuce with my own vinaigrette, celery; Brussels sprouts in season; green cabbage, raw, roasted, sautéed with pork.
Other vegetable – any orange squash, roasted; green, yellow, or red sweet peppers, carrots, cauliflower, raw or roasted; fresh tomato slices in the summertime; tomato sauce or roasted tomatoes, otherwise; purple cabbage, mostly in salads.
I’m sure you get the idea of my food groupings without my having to fill in all the blanks. I eat fruits on a seasonal basis, buying just a couple of pieces and letting them come to goodness on the kitchen counter, and they are always eaten raw, in addition to being a separately served course when I’m entertaining or providing a meal for someone else. I keep rice and instant couscous in the pantry, and when I bake any bread, even cornbread, I cut and freeze what isn’t eaten at the meal. And, finally, everything I bake has to freeze wonderfully—because no one should eat an entire pan of brownies for dessert and they dry out the next day—as well as have chocolate in it. Besides, a chocolate bar hidden in the back of the cupboard is a pretty easy way to keep chocolate around, and why shouldn’t it be great dark chocolate? It’s good for you!
So, I start thinking, probably about lunchtime, what’s available in each of my hidden storage spaces, and then I put the meal together thinking of the simplest preparation for each choice, adding the caveat of using only one or two cooking vessels; cleaning up is, after all, part of the cooking process, and I don’t want it to be complicated, either! Some food always stands out as “I want that right now,” and then the rest of Supper has to fall together from that item’s cooking process. That’s why the roasted chicken breast (See #2 – The protein that never fails) makes a good fallback Supper; I can roast two vegetables with it, and, thus, use only one pan!
However, wanting pasta for supper works the same way. I can start the cooking water for the pasta, drop in one of the two vegetables, probably the broccoli, and fish it out before I even cook the pasta in the same water. Then, when the pasta’s finished, quickly I will drain it, slap its cooking pan back on the heat, add some sausage I’ve sliced off the hunk which lives in the freezer, and after the sausage has browned and made the bottom of the pan all smooshy with its juices and carmelization, I smash some garlic and add some olive oil, both of which will serve as additional flavor enhancement for reheating the pasta and broccoli. If I’ve remembered to save some of the pasta water, that’s even better!
And, yes, I’m cooking for myself most of the time. However, every technique I’ve shared with you thus far can be multiplied to feed however many you’re needing to feed.
I challenge you to make your own Food Group list, and, okay, you can drop off chocolate if you really don’t like it, but don’t forget to work in something wonderful you crave each day. Don’t skip dessert. Life is to be lived, and you deserve something good each day!
Next time: Meal planning, tastes and textures.
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