Feeding Time at the Zoo

polkadotmom.com

I reached breaking point one night when Awesome scraped most of his dinner into the bin. Again.

"Any chance we could have some time to plan decent meals for a change?" He asked. I wasn't offended. It was an honest question, and he was right, we had been eating a lot of toast, and throwing out a lot of perfectly good food that I hadn't taken time to cook. But that night, I knew I needed to make some changes to save us from eating over/under cooked creations of who-knows-what mixed together and called Dinner.

printable.tipjunkie.com

So I did what every modern wife does when trying to come up with a plan. I hit the 'net. I know how to cook. So that wasn't the problem. I own a large collection of pristine-looking recipe books. So that wasn't the problem either. It was planning. Or rather, failure to plan.

Someone should coin a saying about that.

Anyway, I google searched "menu planner printable" and there are a LOT to choose from. There are some very creative people out there with expensive publishing software. I graciously allowed them to do the hard work for me. I searched until I found something that met our needs exactly.

Here are our exact needs;
- One week at a time. Monthly planning scares me. And I already tried it and it just didn't work for me.
- No amount of colour-coding, or fancy scrapbooked tags that you stick up with blutac, is going to make me try harder in the kitchen. At the end of a long day at work, I need two things, a clear picture of what I want to achieve, and everything already in the fridge. I hate to shop on the way home from work (I'm allergic to people), so I have to have everything already in the house. Or we eat toast. I picked a simple planner that just covered the basics.
- Dinners only. Awesome gets his own food during the day, as do I, so I only wanted a dinner planner. I have a problem with empty boxes and lines. Its an Type A personality thing. Deal with it.
- We are not home every night, and frequently only one of us is home, and it can change, so a pen and paper list was not going to work for us, and I really didn't want to have to print a new one each week.
I picked a list that could be printed A5 and stuck it in a frame with glass - I use a whiteboard marker to write out the menu and make any last minute changes by rubbing it out with my finger. Classy.

Here's what I do;
1. We shop on sundays on our way to church. I'm not sure why. It's habit.
2. Because Awesome sleeps in on Sunday mornings, after quiet time in the morning, I grab my diary and menu planner and plan for the week. I work out what nights we are out and how many dinners need to be made at home. I also update the Google calendar (which IS colour-coded - see not totally slack) for Awesome so that he knows what is happening during the week.
3. I plan out what meals we are having, and then adjust my weekly vege and fruit box order online (it gets delivered to my work on Tuesdays so I plan around that and can tailor the order down to the last carrot, which is helpful for minimising waste.
4. I write out the meals and a quick shopping list for later reference, so that I know what to pick up and so that we don't spend one zillion dollars at the supermarket. It works well - I rarely spend over $80-$100 a week at the supermarket. Keep in mind that that is mainly dinners, lunch fixings and some minor breakfast foods - we do eat out of the house 1-3 times a week out of necessity, so that's where the balance of our grocery budget goes.
5. I then put it all away and move on with my day and don't have to think about planning a meal for the rest of the week.

Working full time in a job that has variable hours, and with a number of outside committments, I can safely say that I could care less most days about cooking when I get home. But I have been using this system now for three months, and most of the weeks have been so easy. Some times things come up, sometimes I'm just too exhausted to cook and we eat toast, or order-in. That's life and we are ok with that. But I can understand the kajillion women on the internet who post their meal plans each Monday. It actually does make sense. 

Because I'm sure that you care (!) here is this week's menu for us.

Monday: Polenta chicken homemade 'nuggets' and salad (the link is to Alana Chernila's website Eating From the Ground Up - but her recipe is in her book The Homemade Pantry - which I purchased recently and I am in LOVE with).
Tuesday: Baked zucchini and sweet potato chips with steak
Wednesday: Greek Turkey Meatballs with tzatziki and vegetable sticks
Thursday: Slowcooker Minestrone
Friday: Leftover night
Saturday: (store bought) Veal ravioli and napoletana sauce
Sunday: Cold wraps

We are actually home most nights this week, so this is a very 'fancy' week for us. Usually you would see a steak and salad, a chicken dish, a beef dish, pies made in the pie maker and toasted wraps. That's a standard week for us. This week I am also moving back towards a low GI diet and so I am including more low GI meals. 

Can you see how much I love food? How crazy long is this post????

Sadly I can't locate the exact printable I am using, but its best to find something you love any way, so get googling!

Learning to FLY...

image from flylady.net

So earlier this week I started thinking about the house. I'm trying to get the way I take care of my body in order, and that requires routine. But when it comes to the house, I have pretty much always taken a haphazard, do-it-when-I-need-to approach.

Actually, it's more of a do-it-when-I-have-to approach. Whoops.

So when I was reading a post somewhere and a lady said she had caught up on all her washing using the Flylady approach, I was like... ahem! Please share!

I googled Flylady. And realised I had found this site before. And its a tricky one to figure out. For a visual person like me, the layout is busy and the information isn't set up in a sequential way, you have to hunt a bit for what you need. So hunt I did.

I realised that the major emphasis of the system is on having a routine. Ah! I scoff, this will not work for me - I am a shift worker. Routines are the antithesis of getting up at a different time every day...! But I am a little hooked and so I keep reading.

And I realise this isn't a full on, time-dependent routine based system.

Its about doing little things each day that set you up to never really have to do big things. For example, by getting the kitchen reset every night this week, we haven't had an 'overload day' - you know - the day where you have to wash the vegie peeler from three days ago before you can use it again? No? You never have those days? Oh. That's just me...

This week, our bathroom has been guest-ready everyday, it now takes just 30 seconds to keep it that way. The kitchen has been meal prep ready every day. Can. not. explain. how much time that has saved me this week.

And get this, there was not enough dirty washing this morning to make a full load. INSANE!

It takes a bit of getting used to, and me being me, I rushed ahead and did all the baby steps in one go because I couldn't really wait to add one a day. But you might be more sensible than me.

Flylady. It's free, check it out - what have you got to loose?

Menu Plan Monday

I don't regularly take time to plan ahead for meals, but this week I want to make sure that I have things organised as there is a lot going on in my family that I don't have control over.


Here's this week's menu plan:


Monday: Mini-Roast Beef with roast potatoes and vegies


Tuesday: Beef and cheese wraps with Lebanese bread and salad


Wednesday: Out of house night for me so cold sliced beef sandwich. Mr. Awesome is having soup and crusty herb bread from the freezer


Thursday: Slow cooker chicken drumsticks in a cacciatore sauce using sugarless tomato sauce


Friday: Chicken and pasta (leftovers!)


Writing it out might actually help me stick to it! 


Linking up for Menu Plan Monday at http://orgjunkie.com. If you are visiting from Laura's site a huge hello and welcome to Eyes Above. I am working on creating a sugarless lifestyle, and I am no longer consuming fructose or artifical/natural sweeteners including honey. Read more here.

Menu Plan Monday

This Week's Menu at the Lord Household

Monday; Burritos with chicken

Tuesday; Pasta bolognaise and vegies

Wednesday; Out for Bible Study

Thursday; Honey and Garlic chicken thighs with rice and vegies

Friday; BBQ Steak and Sweet Potato Chips

My husband is mostly home alone this week as I am flitting out to church music rehearsals and work parent meetings, so everything has been prepared and instructions left for assembling each meal, which I can reheat when I get home. We have also been very diligent preparing our own lunches for work this week in an effort to save money on take out and be a little more healthy.

I keep a shoping list and menu plan in my household notebook to remind me of how the week will fall together and have a Command Centre on the fridge to help my husband keep track of the week.

Organisational Nightmares

I am a right brainer. I am one of those people for whom logic is what you call those puzzles in the newspapers, not something you use on a day to day basis. I make decisions based on feelings rather than fact, manage by trust and expectation rather than edict, get distracted in the middle of things and always try to do more than one thing at a time.

As I've got older and have more responsibility and tasks to achieve, my right brainedness (or right brainedmess as some would probably call it) has been at the forefront of the difficulties I have in my work and home life. It seems that since I moved out of home some years ago, I have been surrounded mostly by left brainers, particularly those who do not have even a clue that there are right brainers on the planet!

I am living in a world that requires organisation, deadlines, priorities, and plans. In my head is a world of notions, half-baked ideas and a love of changing thought patterns every few minutes. ... actually in the middle of that sentence I checked my bank balance and updated my facebook status...

I am trying to be organised. I have all the gear, planners, books, noteboards, highlighter pens and postit notes. I have read books on Organisation for the Creative Person and Time Management for the creative person (Creativelee Speaking). And they were helpful, its all very helpful. And I do things in creative ways that achieve the same result as my left brain partner, friends and family.

My house has boxes, bowls and jars for items you might not think are decorative. Like a large coffee jar with no lid which I use as a store-all for all my paints and brushes. Or the back of the door in the spare room which has coathangers with all my hair ribbons and headscarves pegged on it for ease of choice.

There are very leftbrained sections of my home. Like the shoe rack and boxes for my 'special shoes' and the rack with handbags and hats organised by size.

I menu plan weekly with my husband to avoid overspending, carry a household notebook with budgets, shopping lists, rosters, calendars and Bible verses that inspire me.

In one sense I am an organisational over-achiever! But I find that if I don't have these measures in place I will simple fail to achieve all the tasks I need to to have a balanced brain.
I still slip, probably multiple times a day, and become side-tracked in my own little world of lovely right-brained funness. But I am trying to keep my mind disciplined and hopefully, I will develop the ability to scuttle between the two without loosing my unique and creative passion for life.

Over the next week I will be holding Right Brainer Gets Organised Week. I will post picture of my organisational systems around the home. Hopefully I will help some other Righties out there who struggle to function in a left brained working world!

Thank you kindly!

Wedding thank you cards have become my new reason for living. I have so many to do! I am thankful for organised bridesmaids and my mother for keeping meticulous lists during the present opening stages of our engagement, kitchen tea, girls night party and wedding.

I have created a control list which I have printed A5 for my household notebook and will use as a tick page as I complete each card. I also wanted to include a photo with each card - thats about 80 prints! But I have found a website (Australian) www.snapfish.com.au which will print the photos cheaply and in wallet size (four to a 4x6 inch page).

I am hoping to knock these over in the next 4 weeks. There seems to be so much to do once the house is settled...