As time has passed, I continue to have a passion for sitting down to the dinner table and pre-planning my meals. Sometimes in life it feels like meal planning is the only area of my life I have control of...ha! Yes, my plans change and some of my meals don't go as planned, but I always get a do over the next day and week. Meal planning has taught me to be flexible and I truly love that we sit down to the dinner table together almost every single night. Tim Challies blogpost 5 Reasons We Eat Together as a Family resonates with the reasons why I enjoy sitting down to the dinner table:
- It keeps us healthy: When we eat at home, I can more easily control what goes in our bodies. I can choose the sodium level, choose not to fry the foots, select organic ingredients or ingredients with some things that are on my no no list like high fructose corn syrup and red dye 40.
- It keeps us relationally healthy: At the dinner table, we talk about our days and we find out things that happened at school that we may not find out otherwise. We get to try new things and we learn about manners, which help us with our relationships with others.
- It keeps us spiritually healthy: We have a calendar of verses we read from every day and we talk about new vocabulary words and break down the verses so our kids can better understand the meaning.
- It keeps us financially healthy: Wow does it ever! Going out to eat is a treat for our family because we eat in so often! I can make a meal for less than $10 and we can't get out of a restaurant for less than $25 ~ and that's fast food most of the time! We save so much money by eating at home!
- It keeps us behaviorally healthy: At the dinner table we can talk about expected behavior outside the actual incident. Sometimes as parents we have a list of behaviors we would like to talk with our kids about and I personally don't always like to talk about the expectations when the expectations are not met. So, we randomly talk about expectations at the dinner table sometimes!
This list is a great reflection (and check out Tim's blog) of why eating together is so important, but I can't help but think about how great it is just to sit together as a family every day. In this fast paced world, it's my opportunity to just be with my family. It's sacred and so important to us.
I work 45 minutes from home and after picking up two children my commute home from work is 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes daily. By the time I get home, it's 5:30-6:00, depending on traffic. When I walk in the door, everyone is HANGRY (Hungry - Angry) within about 15 minutes! So I've determined that I have to be on point with dinner timing so that we can spend the most time together and so that the kids can get to bed at a decent hour.
For the rest of this blog I'm going to focus on what I did to prepare for this week. It took me about 1.5 hours and my meals are ready to go in the fridge.
Each year at the end of July and all of August I work really hard to use everything possible in my freezer and pantry. This is for multiple reasons:
- In August, extra money from our budget goes to back to school expenses, so by cleaning out my pantry and freezer I can save on groceries and put those funds in the back to school fund.
- Starting in October, I make a lot of soups. When I make soup I make double batches and freeze one batch for meals...so I need freezer space.
- We are going on vacation next week, so I'm using a lot of things in the fridge so it won't go bad.
Here's the menu for this week with some details about how I prepped everything.
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| Stuffed and ready! |
- Cooked 2 pounds of ground beef (1 pound for this recipe and 1 pound for the nachos on Friday)
- White Rice cooked in a can of diced tomatoes
- A random assortment of spices (garlic, pico seasoning)
- Bell peppers cut in half or with the top cut off
- I mixed rice and beef together put it in the bell peppers, put shredded cheddar on top and put in the fridge so the only thing needed is heating in the oven. Veggies are included in the stuffed bell peppers, so we probably will just have that for dinner with a side of fresh fruit and carrot sticks.
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| Ingredients for greek chicken on left Ingredients for chicken fajitas on right |
Monday: Grilled Greek Chicken
- Bought one big package of chicken breasts, used half for this recipe and half for the chicken fajita recipe.
- Put in ziplock bag with greek yogurt, basil, oregano, garlic, lemon juice, and red wine vinegar
- Put in the fridge to grill Monday night
- Serve with Broccoli and green beans
Tuesday: Chicken Fajitas
- Put in a ziplock bag chicken breasts, salsa, chicken Taco Seasoning
- Will grill with greek chicken above and put in fridge for Tuesday night
- Serve with salsa, cheese, shredded lettuce, on tortillas
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| Here's my shelf with (a) meatballs and bread, thawing; (b) greek chicken marinating, (c) chicken fajitas marinating |
- I buy day old bread from Jimmy John's for 50 cents a loaf. I can cut one loaf into 4 sections. When I buy them I always buy two extra loaves and freeze them.
- On Sunday I took my bread out of freezer and put in the fridge along with my frozen meatballs.
- On Wednesday night, meatballs will be thawed reducing heat time. I heat on the stove in spaghetti sauce.
- Slice bread and put in toaster oven with a little butter and garlic (love my toaster oven because I don't have to heat my big oven, which heats the house.)
- Serve with cesar salad
- Put tilapia from Costco in the fridge on Tuesday, so it will be thawed, reducing cook time. Pan cook with garlic and old bay seasoning.
- Serve with veggies, typically broccoli and green beans.
- I always keep a bag of tortilla chips in the house because sometimes nachos just make life easy on Friday night!
- Using the 1 lb of ground beef I cooked earlier in the week.
- Using the leftover rice I made for the stuffed bell peppers too as "Spanish rice"
So essentially, putting my frozen ingredients in the fridge to thaw and precooking meat when I can is how I get dinner on the table in 15-20 minutes every night.
What are your tricks for success?
