In The Kitchen Part 2

A year ago I was faithful to my menu plan. I filled it out, I shopped to it, I made what was on it. Oh sure, I probably swapped meals here and there, but for the most part I followed it very carefully.

Now it seems like I fill out the suppers and the full weekend and am forever swapping stuff out and forever wondering what we are having for lunch. Forever wondering if that is what I really want to make. Forever second guessing it. That's not good, plus it is usually very wasteful!

So I have a couple goals in this area.

• To faithfully fill out the menu plan.
• To follow the menu plan.
• To work on my list of reliable, inexpensive breakfast and lunch ideas.
• To have a list of fast emergency meals for when my plan gets blown out of the water.
• To have a lose plan in my head were Wednesday is game night, so plan something fun where everything can go in the dishwasher, Monday is Slow Cooker night...etc. Some nights might need a couple headers as we love breakfast for supper but it can get old if we do it each week (plus, you have to call it breakfast for dinner and sing the song).

I also love having a well stocked pantry and freezer, but I would not say I do an excellent job on managing it, and I don't put a whole lot of thought into how I stock it (oh, we use that! It's on a great sale! Buy some!), so I would like to get a better handle on this.

And finally, my husband's work has this eating out atmosphere, almost no one brings lunch. And slowly he has been sucked into this more than he would like after a month of catered lunches for a big project they did. So his goal is to cut way back. Which means that my goal is to constantly have a good rotating assortment of cookies, muffins, sweet breads, fruit, and lunches available for him. This is all stuff I make myself, and he just loads up his lunch box with whatever sounds good to him that morning.

I have a lot of kitchen goals, but I call them goals because they are things I am working towards, areas that I want to do better in, and with all things, improvement is a process, not an instantaneous thing.