Today I cooked dinner under bright lights. Bright new lights from the wonderful freshly installed range hood (although the ducting isn't hooked up yet, but I'm pleased with what it does so far). I also read
Kirsten's post about lists. I do allot of listing too (although many of them don't make it to paper, just linger around in my head space) and left a long comment describing my current can't live without list:
My Dinner List
The Dinner List is my latest tactic to try to get myself inspired about cooking dinner, and it seems to be working. In a long distant past I used to love cooking dinner for myself each evening. It was a way of winding down and switching off from work. But in the last few years, it started to feel more like a chore- like yet another thing to do at the end of a long day. My husband can cook, but chooses not to because I'm a better cook (So he says. Gee, thanks honey).
I tried reorganising my stash of
Gourmet Travellers to provide seasonally relevant inspiration in the kitchen. I tried buying new cookbooks. I tried having a weekly (and then fortnightly) box of organic veggies delivered to our doorstep. But I still seemed to end up buying the same groceries each week in our market and supermarket shopping, and cooking up the same no-brainer meals with increasing disinterest and repetitive frequency.
Enter: the Dinner List. It started as a bit of an extension to the shopping list- writing down first what I was going to serve up that week, so that I could then check the cupboards and write my shopping list accordingly. It was a way of avoiding discovering that I lacked a vital ingredient to try out a new recipe, and also avoid having fresh food go to waste. After a couple of weeks I realised that I was referring to the week before, and planning to cook different things in the next week. I now scrawl the weekly menus on a single page, one after the other, taking a moment when I actually feel inspired to think about dinners to do so.
Having a weekly menu means I don't have to think too much at the end of the day. The pressure is off. I look at the list, pick something, relax, and get on with it. I usually write down 5 or 6 dinner meals- we have takeaway each Friday night (my night off!) and there will usually be one meal of leftovers, or out, or some such alternative arrangement that means I don't have to cook.
Each week usually entails a pasta dish, a stir fry, a "meat and three veg" kind of dinner, and perhaps something with couscous, or a risotto, or a stew, or pie, or other oven baked creation (Bill Granger's Baked Beans
book here, recipe here,was a recent highly successful new recipe on the menu- yes, baked beans for dinner, and C
loved them too). There will usually only be one or two red meat dinners and at least one vegetarian meal each week. A balanced and healthy diet (I think).
Most dinners are things I don't have to refer to a recipe to to make. Typically, they can be prepared and cooked in about 30 minutes, with preparation starting after we put C to bed (he often has a small portion of the previous day's leftovers for his dinner the next day). Some take longer, but I reserve those for days when I'm not working, and can do some preparation ahead. Like today, when I made Lasagna, which, consulting my list, I see we haven't had for at least two months. Actually, now that I think about it, that's probably because we had it for a week straight when we were renovating the kitchen. Clearly that was before I started using my Dinner List.
I've had a few conversations with people recently about how they go about planning their shopping and meals- I'd be interested to hear your approach too...
