Real Food: My Saturday Strategy

I love Saturdays.  It's a quiet day when I can catch up on my personal life and wind down from the week.  The irony is that my favorite task on my day off is similar to what I spend lots of time doing at my job during the week.  I spend time each weekday morning planning and prioritizing my tasks so that I know what I need to do and when I need to do it to get the most important tasks done first and in the most effective manner at work.  Type A personality that I am, this kind of planning is downright fun for me. 

Recently I've honed some areas of household management in the same kind of way.  Reid and I are on  a tight budget.  There are things we're doing now that I would have once described as drudgery and kill joys like calculating expenses and meal planning.  However, I've found that spending 30 minutes to an hour of time planning each weekend can really save me A LOT of time and stress during the week.

Our Saturday mornings begin with a strategy session where Reid and I eat breakfast, update our budget, and my favorite part of all, plan the weekly menu.

We have a small white board on the fridge with a space for each day of the week (we found said white board out by the dumpster, but that's another story).  After we go shopping for groceries, I write the week's plan up on the board, and add any notes about prep work I need to remember to do days in advance.  Reid helps with some preparation too, and so his notes are starred. As a result of my meal plan, I'm never at a loss for what to cook each night, and I stay ahead of the game the night before to make sure I've thawed, soaked, or otherwise prepared for the next day's meals.  In a real food kitchen, planning ahead is a big key to success.

A lot my of Facebook friends have been asking about recipes I've posted.  So I've decided to share my meal plans here and update throughout the week with information about recipes that were particularly successful.  I'll also share my little tips and tweaks for saving money, improvising on ingredients, and saving time.

So, here's this week's plan. Many of the recipes I'm using are linked below:

Saturday: Creamy Fennel and Greens Soup  with bread
Sunday: Roasted Chicken with potatoes
Monday: Ginger Orange Beef Stir Fry with carrots, snap peas, and broccoli & sprouted rice
Tuesday: Crockpot Chuck Roast Supreme with left over rice from Mon
Wednesday: Crockpot Chicken Quinoa & Roasted Cauliflower
Thursday: Salmon Cakes with Sauteed Kale & Garlic
Friday: Left Overs :)

We just finished the Creamy Fennel and Greens Soup for dinner.  Not my favorite but it filled us up and was a good use of the beet and turnip greens we had left over from our CSA order last week.  The fennel was something I'd never cooked with before, so trying it in a soup was a good start. 

My only other new recipe this week is Monday's stir fry, which I'm sort of making up myself.  So we'll see what happens!