Before I had a baby (and started a demanding PhD program, which is like having a second baby), I spent many a Saturday morning wandering around farmer’s markets and specialty food shops in New York City. I’d sip my coffee and contemplate the various heirloom tomato varieties, linger over my choice of cheeses, get recommendations from the butcher and so forth. I could take my time in mosying back home and, if I liked, I could spend all day Sunday cooking for my husband and myself. Or not– we could just as easily go out for brunch and order dinner in. Ahh, how deliciously self-indulgent that all seems now.
These days I’m responsible for not just my meals, but someone else’s. (Plus snacks!) Now that we live in Berkeley, I can walk to a few specialty food shops in my ‘hood, but real grocery shopping involves a car-trip (and a car seat). I love to cook, but fooling around with a boeuf bourguignon recipe on a lazy Sunday afternoon and having dinner on the high chair by 6:00 every night are two entirely different things. After a long day spent studying, it’s quite a task to come home, look in the ‘fridge and whip up nutritious and delicious baby/toddler food night after night. After one week of feeding E. toasted cheese every night, I decided I needed more of a game plan going into the evening– or rather a menu plan.
I used to think menu planning was for squares–I wanted to buy and prepare whatever took my fancy any given evening. Post-motherhood and grad school, two problems with that strategy became apparent. One was that what took my fancy in the store on Saturday and at home on Tuesday did not always coincide, even remotely (meaning a lot of produce was going bad before I used it) and the other was that I was running out of ‘fancy’ (see “long days spent studying” above–hence the week of toasted cheese sandwiches).
I’ve come to the Dark Side. Now, I make a menu each week before I go shopping, taking into consideration that I need quick easy dinners during the week. I use the menu to make a shopping list, adding in staples like milk or olive oil that don’t necessarily get listed out on the menu, and then I stick to the list as closely as possible in the store. The immediate consequences of this have been that I now spend less money on food, I use virtually everything I buy and I never have to think about what I’m going to make for dinner. I also can get in and out of the store a lot quicker, even with E. in tow.
Leo, over at Zen Habits, has a great post on grocery shopping for a big family. I don’t follow all his recommendations, but his ideas have helped me streamline quite a bit.
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