Menu Planning - The Beginning

After a busy weekend of wedding planning I find myself back in Nebraska with an empty fridge and no meal plan for the week. In retrospect, I probably should have done this before I left so I didn't have to scramble today to get something together for dinner. Now that the bar is over and I have a lot more time on my hands, my current goal is to overhaul our diet to try and make it fresher and more balanced. Right now I'm only doing a full plan for dinners since breakfast and lunch tends to be a fend for yourself type occasion. I will probably start making myself a rotating list of lunch possibilities once I get a better feel for the dinner plan.

I have been writing up the week's dinners and grocery list for the past three years but now it's time to take it to the next level by starting to cut out convenience foods and adding in more vegetable sides. We have definitely had some difficulty in making sure that each meal has some sort of vegetable since I usually only plan the entrée which at times will be pretty much devoid of vegetation. I expect to be eating a lot of salads in the next couple weeks while I adapt to preparing actual side dishes with my meals. Frozen vegetables are also good options so that will be a matter of figuring out the best way to jazz them up a little. There's nothing wrong with a bowl of plain frozen veggies but it's easier to eat them consistently if they have have more flavor. I feel like fresh vegetables are easier to prepare plain since they tend to have a much better flavor than their steam-in-bag counterparts.

As far as recipes, I rely pretty heavily on the "Cook this, Not That" Books and Southern Living's 1001 Ways to Cook Southern. I do use some internet recipes when the mood takes me but there's just something about flipping through cookbooks that I enjoy. As I start cooking new and more involved dishes I imagine I'll start branching out more.

Without further ado, the current dinner list:

Hoisin Beef Kabob (salad)

Tacos (salad)

Burgers (fries and chili lime grilled corn)

Shrimp and Grits (salad)

Garlic and Herb Stuffed Chicken (garlic cream asparagus)

Shrimp and Pasta w/ Creole Cream Sauce (salad)