the oxymoron that is Vague Meal Planning

i have this and i have that and we’ll see what i make this week

Note: This issue, and every future issue, will be coming to you a little later each Saturday so that I can bring you my farmers market hauls in real time. And now for something completely different.

Not to be confused with meal prepping, meal planning is the first step in the chain of events leading each meal to your dinner table.

Traditional meal planning is my worst enemy. With specific recipes for specific days, each meal plan calendar that I see makes me think that I must be doing something wrong if I’m not following it exactly. The idea that I’ll be making 5 different recipes from Monday to Friday makes me die inside a little. They create this impossible standard to live up to — this idealized schedule has been spelled out for you, making it seemingly simple and convenient. I say fuck that. As much as I absolutely love cooking, you will never find me making a different recipe every night.

Reading recipes is a true skill. It takes time to develop all the good kitchen habits — a little mise en place here, a little clean-as-you-go there — and I think it’s a mistake to adhere to weekly meal plans that have you sweating bullets in the kitchen every night of the week to put dinner on the table in a timely manner. While many subscribe to these weekly meal plans with hopes and dreams of making life “easier”, they are also (usually) unknowingly putting throwing themselves into new culinary territory. When I was going through my long phase of making new recipe after new recipe, it became increasingly obvious to me that the “active” and “cooking” times are pretty much always inaccurate.

Unless you’ve allotted yourself about 2x the time suggested in the recipe, there often isn’t enough time at the end of the workday to get that meal on the table. It paints a picture: you’re racing against the clock, hurriedly throwing ingredients at your stove or oven, and then you end up with a messy ass kitchen with a million dirty dishes in the sink. It’s not fun, and it’s not encouraging anyone to spend more time cooking.

Like, maybe the reason creating and publishing meal plans is easy for the people who make them is BECAUSE IT’S THEIR JOB. They are constantly working on developing each recipe, cooking it over and over again, taking meticulous notes, and getting faster at it. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for them to be making something different every night for dinner — they probably made 4 other things earlier that day, ffs. And this work is incredibly valuable! Each recipe provides an opportunity to learn new things and have something delicious at the end of it. And this is my hot take on all that: I find that the concept of The Meal Plan actually kind of ignores the perspective of the supposed target audience that it’s trying to help. Constantly trying new recipes is tiring on the brain and often creates more work than satisfaction, so the bandwidth just isn’t there. So for the rest of us, I find that it’s worth more to work smarter, not harder.

What are your thoughts on strictly adhering to weekly meal plans? I’d love to hear all your thoughts and feelings, so comment below!

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So what I have to offer you this week is the idea of Vague Meal Planning.

Vague Meal Planning is exactly what it sounds like. I can see how it might induce the same kind of panic that an extremely specific meal plan would, but I promise you it will not. It can actually take some of the pressure off of yourself to make specific recipes that require you to make a big trip to the grocery store for ingredients you might not even use again.

Step 1 — The Framework

First, I like to start with a framework, putting all the basic information in one place. What does this look like? A prioritized list of ingredients.

Priority #1: PROTEIN

Priority #2: PERISHABLES

Priority #3: TIME

Step 2 — Prep What You Can

Second, I take into account what I might be able to have prepped before the week starts. Like I wrote about in my component cooking issue [LINK], having basic (unseasoned) staples ready to go in your fridge can help you put together a full meal in minutes. No longer do you have to think “oh shit, I forgot to start the rice on time.” We’ve all been there, but thinking and doing ahead as much as possible buys you free time later. Do your best.

Step 3 — Schedule. Schedule. Schedule.

Third, I look at the calendar for the week ahead and determine the amount of time that I have each night to get dinner on the table. I may not work the traditional 9-5, but I sure as hell fill that time to get shit done from 9-5. I assess all of the time I’ll be spending at gigs and doing the other mental load bullshit that I have to keep on top of. I also have to consider that my 3-year-old son is still a pretty full-contact child, he’s my little Velcro child. I love spending all the 1-on-1 time with him while he still likes me, but it is involved. So I have to use distractions like Sesame Street very strategically to get things done. Once the Sesame Street runs out, I have to account for the inevitable time being pulled away from my original plans to be efficient in the kitchen. Therefore, I choose dinner ideas that have less active cooking time and give myself more time than I might actually need if I weren’t saying “STOP DOING THAT” or “GET DOWN FROM THERE” every 30 seconds. It’s like clockwork.

Step 4 — The Menu

Last, I put the puzzle pieces together to make a list of the ingredients and which recipes they’ll be worked into.

Here is a sample week of my mental load (from this past week):

PROTEINS:

• sage sausage links, 1 pound

• pork shoulder, 3.3 pounds

• whole chicken, 5 pounds

• ground beef, 1 pound

PERISHABLES:

• thinly sliced collard greens and kale

• salad turnips

• green onions

• leftover pasta sauce

• leftover cooked spaghetti

TIME:

• Monday: 1 hour

  • take son to school

  • exercise + shower (for my mental health)

  • practice violin / learn my music for the week

  • prep my effing 2024 taxes even though the IRS is probably going to be filled with cobwebs by Tax Day

  • laundry day

  • after-school parenting

• Tuesday: 1 ½ hours

  • exercise + shower (for my mental health)

  • more laundry

  • visit a friend who’s having a hard time

  • pick up Thai food for lunch

  • 1pm orchestra rehearsal (2 ½ hours)

  • pick up son from school

  • grocery run + car wash

• Wednesday: 1 hour

  • take son to school

  • exercise + shower (for my mental health)

  • 10am orchestra rehearsal (2 ½ hours)

  • writing this newsletter

  • researching floating shelves for my cookbooks

  • after-school parenting

  • 7:30pm orchestra concert (leave no later than 6:45pm)

• Thursday: solo parenting day, so 30 minutes?

  • take son to school

  • exercise + shower (for my mental health)

  • writing this newsletter

  • 1pm orchestra rehearsal (2 ½ hours)

  • pick up son from school

  • grocery run (ingredients for baking a cake with my son on Saturday 🥹🥰)

  • after-school parenting

• Friday: gig right up until dinner time = 0 minutes

  • take son to school

  • 10am orchestra rehearsal (2 ½ hours)

  • pick up husband from airport

  • late lunch date

  • pick up son from school

  • wedding gig 4:30-5:30pm

  • final edits for this newsletter (after bedtime)

Here’s that sample week’s Vague Meal Planning process:

PROTEINS

ground beef = thaws quickly = meatballs

sage sausage links = thaws quickly = savory millet

pork shoulder = thaws slow = crockpot carnitas tacos

whole chicken = thaws slow = roast then shred

PERISHABLES + TIME NEEDED

Monday - 1 hour: meatballs + spaghetti ; collard + kale salad with salad turnips

• during school: make meatball mixture, form into balls

• dinner prep: make salad dressing, bake meatballs, reheat spaghetti and sauce

Tuesday - 1 ½ hours: savory millet with sage sausages, green onion, cottage cheese, and everything bagel seasoning

• during school: soak millet in water with splash of ACV

• dinner prep: cook millet, cook sausages,

Wednesday - 30 minutes: crockpot carnitas tacos

• during school: add ingredients to crockpot, turn on

• dinner prep: shred pork, quick pickle red onions, heat tortillas

Thursday: pizza night (ahh the beauty of a cheat night)

• during school: roast chicken, save in fridge to shred meat over the weekend for chicken salad

• dinner prep: preheat oven, bake 19 minutes, be thankful that my favorite frozen pizzas are back at Costco

Friday: choice of leftovers (ahh the beauty of leftovers)

• dinner prep: reheat and serve

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This method of meal planning took the way that used to I shop for food and turned it upside down. I don’t depend entirely on random recipes to dictate my grocery list. Especially during the warmer months, I let what’s available at the market nudge me one way or another to cook certain things and in certain styles. And yes, things get a little mundane from January to mid-April for produce, but I have my easy fall-backs, like that collard and kale salad that I could eat 5 times a week until I die.

This is what it looks like on paper in my Golden Coil planner. If you are a planner person, I cannot recommend this company enough! When I say everything is customizable, I am not exaggerating. A little pricey but worth every goddamn penny.

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SARAH’S SATURDAY FARMERS MARKET HAUL

It’s still early for spring produce here in central Indiana, but the salad turnips that *turned up* last Saturday still got me pumped for spring markets. And they were delicious in our collard + kale salad — bitter and buttery, and my son eats them up!

April 5

produce: salad turnips ($4)

protein: 2 dozen eggs ($10) — 5 lb whole chicken + 1 lb sage sausages + 3.3 lb pork shoulder + 1.18 beef liver + 1 lb chicken livers ($88.94)

total spent = $102.94

And then the leftovers drift over into the next week, making other meal times easier to handle at the end of the day. You just read what I did for meal planning the above ingredients, but what about today’s farmers market haul? (You might have also noticed that I don’t use every protein that I buy, as a way to stretch and strategize the grocery budget.)

April 12

produce: salad turnips ($4) — french breakfast radishes!!, chives, collard greens, mixed salad greens ($16)

protein: 1 dozen eggs ($5) — sockeye + coho salmon ($55) — 2 pound italian sausage, 5 pound whole chicken ($50.50)

total spent = $130.50

potential dinner recipes, off the top of my dome:

• pesto pasta (orecchiette) + crumbled italian sausage

• roast chicken; mixed salad greens with homemade chive vinaigrette

• lemon + chive coho salmon fillets; collard + kale salad with salad turnips

• french breakfast radishes + salad turnips with hummus

Again, I’m saving some of the protein (the sockeye salmon) for a future week because the fish vendor at our market comes 2x a month.

For the remaining meals of the day, we generally rely on a rotation of pretty easy stuff. Breakfast: eggs + toast, yogurt + granola, or smoothies. Lunch: leftovers, sardines on toast, eggs + toast. Eggs + toast is good for any meal of the day, IMHO.

Follow my Substack Notes (on the app) to see how this week of recipes unfolds. And tune in next Saturday for another farmers market haul.

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From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here.

❤️Sarah