As you may remember, I’m trying to decrease the amount of time I devote to food research/preparation/shopping/etc. Meal planning eats a huge chunk of my time.

Meal planning is difficult because I’m trying to find recipes that

• I’m excited about tasting
• Maximize groceries I have on hand
• Won’t take forever to cook
• Don’t require specialized equipment or ingredients

Getting a perfect score on all four vectors isn’t easy, but I do have a few techniques I’m trying out.  For starters, I’m using Plan To Eat to help me corral my recipes and visually plan my diet.

I’ve also adopted “day of the week” dieting to help me keep everything straight in my head and to make recipe selection faster.  This is how my current pescetarian plan looks:

BREAKFAST on weekdays consists of a hard-boiled — no, hard-steamed egg, a smoothie, plus a bit of random whatever to keep the edge off.  This is a great way to use up that Graze subscription I haven’t talked myself out of canceling yet. (I like the snacks, but I’m not eating them as much as when I started the subscription.)  Weekend breakfasts are celebrations of bacon and eggs, and roasted new potato “fries.”  I also get one day a week of McDonald’s, so I can sleep a little late.

LUNCH on weekdays is a salad. I’m exploring salads in two books to expand my repertoire, Salad of the Day and Salad Samurai. I make one from each book every Sunday, and split each salad into two large 24-ounce  Mason jar-sized portions.  I leave one day alone, so I can go to lunch with co-workers or escape the office.  I’m not scheduling lunch on weekends, which might be a mistake.

DINNER, the centerpiece meal of the day, is where the “of the day” cooking comes into play.

• SUNDAY: Pizza night, because I have a little time on Sunday to whip up a crust if needed.
• MONDAY: Leftover pizza, because no one wants to cook on Monday.  It’s also a no-cook day due to other commitments.
• TUESDAY: Fish night, since current research says we need Omega 3.  Recipes will be sourced from Pinterest.
• WEDNESDAY: Freezer night, since I need to eat all this stuff.
• THURSDAY: Pasta dishes and rice/grain dishes on alternating weeks.  I want to play with fakes, like spiralized zucchini noodles and cauliflower rice, too.  I’ll have to think about how to work those in.  Maybe once a month for variety?  I’ll source these recipes from Pinterest. These dishes will probably be my freezer meals.
• FRIDAY: Cookbook night. I bought Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Matrix, hooked by its premise of learning how “how simple changes in preparation and ingredient swaps in a master recipe can yield dishes that are each completely different from the original, and equally delicious.”  Hopefully this book will help with my lack of a mental recipe database.
• SATURDAY: Free meal.  I can eat out, or order a pizza, or have a dozen donuts.  It’s my day, and damn it, it’s usually my favorite meal of the week.

MISC TASKS: On Saturday mornings I do grocery shopping, and on Saturday afternoon/evening I have a new rule that anything I haven’t eaten from the week before needs to be preserved somehow. Frozen, dehydrated, whatever. If I don’t have any preservation cooking to do, then I can cook something weird, like banana vinegar or an artisan vegan cheese, or something from Modernist Cuisine at Home.

DISASTER NIGHTS (we all have ’em) are what freezers are made for.

DISASTER WEEKENDS: I also spend at least one weekend a month away from home, which pretty much wrecks my diet. I arrive home to an empty kitchen late on Sunday night, and I won’t have time to shop until Tuesday evening.  Last year I limped through that week, eating fast food, and waited until the following Saturday to get back on track. My trips always turned into seven day diet disasters that undermined all the good habits I’m trying so desperately to establish.

My plan is evolving as I write, but I’m thinking I need a frozen breakfast solution.  It could be something I make myself (Quiche? Waffles? Egg sandwiches?) or some Jimmy Dean Egg McMuffin clones. For lunch I can buy two convenience salads on the way home.  I drive right past a grocery store, and while it will be late and I’ll be exhausted, I’ll have to find the energy to buy two salads.  Monday’s leftover pizza can become an Archer Farms flatbread crust topped with roasted veggies from my freezer.  Tuesday’s dinner, prepared after grocery shopping, can be a frozen fish entree.  HEB has a pecan-crusted tilapia I like.

This feels complicated.  Heck, It is complicated, at least for a non-cook like me. It took me two and a half hours to write this post! But this plan has the flexibility I need, and contingencies for all the disasters I encounter on a regular basis.  I think this might work.