Organized Eats

Posted by Manda(rific) on January 9, 2012 in Foodies!, Ramble | 2 comments

My mission thus far in 2012 has been to, in blunt terms, fucking get my shit organized. I’m a big fan of keeping things rattling around in my head to the point of bursting, which if you read any books on organization or listen to anyone who knows what they’re talking about, that’s the absolute last thing you should be doing when you’re trying to get organized. Instead you need to get it all out of your head, and onto paper. Or screen. Or something that’s not your brain goo.

For me, this falls into three categories. If people are interested, I’ll be glad to do some more blog posts, but this basically broke down into things I eat, money I spend, and crap I work on. I’m still going to be fidgeting to get the crap I work on organized for some time, and the money I spend is basically under control with this awesome app that I downloaded (Expense Tracker, I think it’s called?), so the easiest one to tackle ended up being things I eat.

Here are the problems with how Nick and I eat: I love to cook, but I never feel like I have time for it (part of the reason I’m getting organized in the first place), we always want to lean towards things that are quick or easy, and we always feel like we eat the same things over and over when we know we are capable of cooking many different things. Our typical week might consist of two nights of Hamburger Helper, a night of baked pasta, two nights of fast food, and one night of, like, anything we can find in the fridge.

That’s not how we should be eating. I am a huge advocate/fan of healthy food, and healthy seems to be so time consuming and you have to buy fresh things and it’s just hard. It shouldn’t be hard. It should be easy.

So I tried to get down to the basis of the problem – organization. Because we don’t know what we’re going to eat until we eat it, our meals depend largely on what dishes are clean or what we have in the fridge. This is backwards. We should be planning our dishes and our shopping around what we want to eat. It’s much easier, less stressful, and more cost effective.

I’m a huge fan of index cards, and I found these tiny 3″ x 2.5″ cards at Staples the other day. They were like this, but plain white. (Though I’m thinking now I need to get some of the colored ones.) I have a bulletin board outside of our kitchen that I wasn’t using, and somehow this idea just clicked.

I flipped over seven of the cards to the plain white side, and wrote a day of the week on each one. Then, I took more of the cards and wrote down what we ate for dinner and what ingredients it called for, down to the specifics. If we were having something that involved stuffing, I even wrote down the butter needed to make the stuffing.

I ended up with a bunch of cards like this, pleasantly surprised by how many meals I could think of off the top of my head that we could easily make that were cost effective, including three non-home-cooked cards: one “Wild Card” for fast food or takeout, one “Scavenger Hunt” (eat whatever you can find, nobody’s cooking), and one “Pizza Night” for us to get a $10 take-and-bake pizza from our favorite joint.

What was extra fun for me about making the cards was that it started to feel like a card game of some kind, something that – just in case you’re new here, I’m a fan of. Sure, it may be a little childish, but by making the selection of what we were going to eat that week “fun,” I think I made it a much more enjoyable process. Plus, since I listed out all of the ingredients and only made one card for each meal, it’s much easier to prevent us from slipping into the monotony of “baked pasta, again?”

Ultimately once I hug the board up and chose what meals we were going to eat, it looked like this:

If you couldn’t tell, the little ziploc next to the pinned cards holds all the rest of them. Since this is my first time trying this, I haven’t quite figured out what the process is going to be to switch the cards over, but I’m thinking after we get through Tuesday I’ll sit down and figure out those days again so I can include them in my weekly shopping, or maybe just shuffle the cards as we go. Last night we had Hamburger Helper, so I went ahead and pinned that card up so we don’t do that anymore this week. That’s it. Fin. No more Hamburger Helper.

So now I can see at a glance what we’re going to eat, I can know that at least at some point this week I’ll be able to have a nice slice of pizza, and make my shopping list much more effectively. As a bonus, I have like ten more recipes in the ziploc that I can use for the next few weeks, which is a nice assurance that I won’t have baked pasta eight times this week. It’s also right next to our kitchen and entryway to the apartment, so we HAVE to see it. No ignoring it.

I’m not sure if this will work for everyone, or how well it will work for me, but I’m feeling pretty confident about it, and the internet wanted to see what I had going, so here we go.

Do any of you out there have your own meal-planning systems? Anything as organized (or more organized?!) as this? Have a favorite quick-fix recipe we can add to the rotation for those nights we just don’t want to spend 3 hours preparing a meal?

Throw ‘em at me.