I’ve read that the two biggest things that couple argue about are money and the division of household duties (sex comes in at #3). That’s not so for Randy and me. I think the biggest source of contention is the difficulty we have deciding what to eat for dinner and/or where to go if we’re going to eat out. It’s ridiculous. We’ve been struggling/arguing about this for over eleven years now. How hard can it be?
I think though that figuring out meals and menus must be a problem for more than just us. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be places like Super Suppers or Dream Dinners where one can go and assemble meals from prepared menus to pop into the freezer. There are other resources as well. Saving Dinner will email weekly menus, grocery lists and recipes. The magazine Taste of Home offers a weekly Menu$aver newsletter with a week’s worth of recipes. Kraft Foods offers online meal plans and a free cooking magazine.
I’m making the effort again to plan our meals ahead of time instead of daily opening the fridge hoping that inspiration will magically strike. My plan is to make the dishes that we like from the dozens of cookbooks I own. As I prepare a recipe, I’ll make a copy of it, put the copy in a sheet protector and add it to my two 3-inch binders of recipes I’ve saved over the years. The binder is organized by categories (e.g., quick breads, cakes, appetizers, etc.) which I adapted from the my favorite reference cookbook The Joy of Cooking (why reinvent the wheel, right?). As I add the recipes I use regularly to the binders, I’ll remove the recipes I’ve never made. Eventually, I’ll be able to use my cookbooks for ideas but for my day-to-day cooking, my binders will be what I utilize. There will be no more searching for that one recipe that we liked but don’t know which cookbook or magazine I pulled it from.
I figure if I can also make a list of the entrees/meals that we like, I can pretty much just rotate through it over several months so we’re not eating the same thing week in and week out. I keep my pantry stocked with staples so it’ll just be a matter of referring to my “menu” and buying the necessary perishable items each week.
My hope is that we won’t waste precious time going back and forth about what to eat, we’ll be able to save some money as we won’t have to resort to take-out or fast food out of desperation, we’ll be able to eat at a reasonable hour because the decision-making process will have been done ahead of time, and when we do dine out, it will be “on purpose” and actually be pleasurable. Plus, our eating-out budget won’t be used up by nights of meal indecisiveness.
If this all works as planned, I wonder what Randy and I will argue about.