Weekend Meal Planning - Creating All your Meals for the Week in One Day

The key to eating healthy home made food when you have a busy schedule is planning.  Sitting down on the weekend and spending 20 minutes planning your meals for the week, and then doing as much cooking and preparation as you can on Saturday or Sunday will save you hours of planning and cooking for the rest of the week.  This method has lots of other unintended benefits as well, and the more you develop a routine the more you will see those benefits: less waste, less stress, less expense, more healthy diet.

For some time now, Courtney and I have tried to make a weekly menu before going shopping, starting ingredients that are already in the fridge or pantry.  We  write this list on a white board in the kitchen, and then write in the date that leftovers were made.  Since instituting this simple process, I think we take out the trash about 1/2 as often.  Here is what our whiteboard often looks like

Our Home Kitchen Menu

If you can avoid prepackaged meals and refrain from eating out for convenience sake (I love eating out, but only when I choose to treat myself), you can save a lot of money while gaining more control over your diet.  If you try to plan and cook a meal every night, however, you can quickly become overwhelmed and throw in the towel.

When we decided to do the October: Unprocessed challenge last month, we realized that with our busy schedules we were not going to be able to cook most week nights.  Eating out is expensive, but eating healthy and unprocessed foods out is phenomenally expensive.  In order to meet the challenge and maintain our savings (what little we have) Courtney and I turned our kitchen into a high efficiency food production facility every Sunday last month, and generally produced enough food in one day to last all week (that is why several of the menu items above have the same date by them).  Spending several hours doing intensive cooking is also significantly more efficient in terms of waste and energy.  For example, one Sunday, I made a frittata and Courtney cooked cornbread and pumpkin muffins, all at the same time.  The oven only heats up once, and there was one temperature change half way though, but over all we had 6 meals worth of food with one meals worth of oven time.

You may think that it would take more energy to refrigerate and freeze all that food, but in fact the opposite is true.  The more full your fridge or freezer is, the more efficient it will be.  Your fridge works hardest when you open the door, because all of the air it has cooled down escapes, and warm air rushes in.  The more stuff you have in the fridge, the less warm air can fill the space.  Also, the cold food will help to cool the air, so the actual heat pump doesn't have to work quite as hard.

Our menu over the past few weeks has been pretty extravagant, but our costs and time commitment have been relatively low.  We have been eating even less meat, and we feel free to experiment with more ambitious recipes and ideas (this week we plan on making kimchi).  One of the keys is making things which are not any more work when scaled up in volume, like soups stews and sauces.  The first week we did this, I made a tomato sauce from scratch.  A portion was sweetened and turned into pizza sauce that day, the rest was frozen and used variously as the base for enchilada sauce, a pasta sauce, and to make lasagna.

Homemade Tomato Sauce and Pizza with bell pepper and lobster mushrooms

For the rest of the week, Courtney and I are happy to come home and simply reheat our delicious and nutritious food, to wake up and grab left overs on the way out the door.  We find we spend less on groceries, since we tend to buy fewer items that can be used for several recipes, and that means less food spoils as well.

We have greatly enjoyed our Sunday cooking days, and hope that it will provide good practice for the extra work that a growing family will (eventually) bring.  Also, we are hosting a (very tiny) Thanksgiving here in Eugene for the first time, and our Sunday cooking experiments should serve as good practice for coordinating a large group meal.

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The Meat in the Vegetarian Argument

As part of October: Unprocessed, and leading up to my guest post on Eating Rules later this month, I thought it would be appropriate to re-post this piece, which details some of the issues of food as it relates to sustainability.

Re-Posted from the iPinion Syndicate

You may have heard that being vegetarian is green.  You may also have had a vegan activist tell you that meat is murder and you are killing the planet.  While there is definitely some truth to the argument that a vegetarian diet is a little more earth friendly, there is a little devil in the details.


The issues of food production are numerous, from health and humanity to environmental impact and sustainability.  Which issue is most important to you probably depends on a number of factors: your age, location, political views, etc.  By and large, however, beef does not fare well in any serious analysis of food issues.  At least, not conventional beef that is fattened in a concentrated feed lot.

If global warming and climate change are your primary concerns, you’ll be happy to hear that feed lot beef and dairy are the only things that you need to strike off your menu.  Chicken, fish and eggs are comparable to vegetables in green house gasses emitted during production and transport.  Speaking of fish, however, is opening a whole other can of worms.


If sustainability is what you are after, a lot of sea food is out: over fishing is stressing stocks all over the world, and aside from a few species that are managed responsibly (wild pacific salmon, e.g.) most edible fish populations are dropping at a staggering rate.  Seafood doesn’t fare well on the health test either; electronics, fluorescent bulbs and industrial practices have contaminated most seafood populations with levels of mercury that are dangerous for human consumption.


If you are a card carrying member of PETA, or sympathetic to their cause, chicken and eggs are back on the black list.  On the humanitarian scale, chicken production is much, much worse than just about anything else out there.  Feed lot beef is not much better.  If humanitarian concerns are foremost in your mind, you should probably explore expensive alternatives to conventional food at a specialty or kosher butcher shop.  If you can’t afford that, then meat is out.


If health is what you are thinking about, then a strictly vegetarian diet might not be a good idea at all.  Many people develop anemia, iron deficiency, or other issues when not eating meat, and careful management of protein and iron intake is essential for a healthy meatless diet.  Pescatarians (a word I am not entirely comfortable with, I’ll have you know) can get around this quite easily, as salmon and mollusks like clams provide massive doses of protein and iron in tiny portions.  But again, mercury is a real threat which much be considered constantly.  Farmed clams are better, but farmed salmon are terrible: they are fed other fish from depleting stocks and foul up coastal waters with concentrated waste.


Here is something that your vegan acquaintances will not be quick to point out, however: grass fed and grass finished cows are better in every way.  On the humanitarian angle, they are demonstrably healthier and ostensibly happier (in so far as we can tell these things).  They produce less methane (a green house gas) and foul up less water during their lives.  They are wildly healthier for you, with little saturated fat and more omega 3 fatty acids than salmon.  Finally, their waste is not concentrated like feed lot cows, which means that it can be absorbed naturally by the environment they are raised in.


In summation, if all of the issues in this article are important to you, you probably should be vegan.  However, if you are willing to do your food homework and buy the right products, you can put the vegan argument out to pasture with the grass fed cows.

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• Simon Fairlie: How Eating Meat Can Save the Planet (time.com)

Nothing New except October: Unprocessed

As the sun sets on my Month of Nothing New, it dawns on October: Unprocessed.  The last month went by rather quickly and uneventfully in terms of my challenge, and after thinking it through, I have decided that one month of making no new purchases (excluding food and medicine) is just too easy.  It was not really a challenge at all.  There were a few minor hiccups, but not one real sense of sacrifice or brilliant solution to a difficult problem.  In short, it was not the fodder for good writing that I had hoped it would be.  All this has led me to the conclusion that I should extend the challenge, keep it going for perhaps six months.  In half a year, I am bound to run into a number of problems that force me to consider breaking the rules, and probably doing it at least once.

Take the Pledge!  Learn More Here.

In the next month, however, I will focus on the October: Unprocessed pledge, and so I will probably be writing a little more about food.  Two things cropped up in September, however, that I felt it would be inappropriate to post in my month of nothing new, so keep your eyes open this October for news about the Unprocessed Pledge and a special treat for my readers.  As I promised at the beginning of last month, the next installment of To Dream of Less will be out soon.  Also, if you don't know about October: Unprocessed, check it out!  Click on the logo above, take the pledge, you still can, join up any time in October and finish the month with Eating Rules, myself, and about 30 other bloggers who have taken the Pledge and agreed to write about it on Andrew Wilder's site.

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