Spaghetti night

We had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight. I used a can of Hunt's spaghetti sauce and Costco frozen meatballs. The entire meal took like 11 minutes to make. It wasn't gourmet, but all five of us ate our fill and liked it. I mean, everybody loves spaghetti night! When I was little we called it bah-sketti. Always a favorite. Every time I make it I wonder why I don't make it more often. It's a cheap, healthy, family-friendly, FAST, filling dinner. Boom.

Let me tell you about my recent existential kitchen crisis. Don't get too excited! There wasn't really a particular catalyst or an official crisis moment, just an overall progression away from the old and towards the new.

Lately I have been experimenting with my meal planning and preparation. I used to plan an entire month of meals and make a giant grocery list and do all of the shopping at once to save time and money. I did that for years (minus pregnancies), and along the way I got really good at fitting a variety of meals into our modest food budget. A couple of months ago, I got tired of the lengthy process of thinking up 20+ meals all at once and listing out the ingredients in one day, and then hefting all those groceries around all at once on another day. It was turning into a dreaded task. It was time for a change! Refresh! So instead of doing a monthly meal plan, I started doing weekly meal plans. It is so much easier! (duh, I know) And I feel so free when I can decide what I'm in the mood to cook week by week, instead of being shackled to the monthly meal plan I dreamed up three and a half weeks ago. Even better, I've figured out how to stay within our slim food budget without monthly meal plans too.

This month I dumbed my meal planning and prep down even more. Yikes! Instead of searching for exciting new recipes to try, I have simply been making easy, mostly kid friendly food. In other words, I've been relying on the old standbys, like spaghetti, eggs, taters, rice, and chicken nuggets (not all at once, of course). I know this all seems so obvious, but it has been so liberating! Why didn't I free myself from the need to cook for more than 15 minutes a day sooner? Cooking was becoming drudgery. Now I can whip up a pot o noodles in 8 minutes and we're all perfectly happy. 

I must add that I wasn't cooking all of those other previous meals out of some sense of obligation or anything. I wasn't even cooking gourmet things! The recipes I chose just took longer than 15 minutes to make. After a while I discovered that I was cooking those harder recipes more from habit--I used to really enjoy searching out and cooking up new dinners, so I kept doing it for a while after it stopped being fun. And then my Amber-pregnancy demolished my list of quick and easy standby dinners. I had to nearly start over finding quick and easy family friendly meals! A daunting task indeed, but I've accumulated a small list in the past year or so. I still appreciate good food, and we still have good food; it's just not always new or time consuming to cook. 

Here's my current trend: each week I choose one big meal to cook, such as a big batch of burrito filling in the crock pot, which lasts us 2-3 dinners. Then I fill in the remaining days with easy simple foods like grilled cheese and tomato soup, mac and cheese, or eggs. Friday is pizza night. Sometimes I make a double batch of crust to last us an extra night. Grampa Dan started making pancakes for the family on Saturday nights. Then we're back to Sunday and a new week. So little effort is involved in this meal planning method! I love it! Who knows how long it'll be (if ever) before I'm recovered and ready to jump back into culinary craftiness, but for now this is WORKING for me.

Bonus: this new-found culinary simplicity is good for the ole budget--aka, it's cheap to eat simply! We'll cross the February food finish line with a sub-$300 grocery bill! Woot. These days I don't really try to save money out of our food budget anymore because I've streamlined it half to death over the past few years and we always eat well for $350 per month. Imagine my surprise when I saw just how much was still hanging around in the ole food $$ allotment this late in the month! That extra $$ means a nice hefty pantry-restock is headed our way. Wins all around. (said in Jack Sparrow's voice)

With these fast and easy meals I've been making, it often takes longer to clean up dinner than it did to cook!