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Strategic Meal Planning: Making the most of your time and your walletBY: Guest User | Category: Food | Submitted: 2010-02-24 19:46:08
What does your home life look like at the end of the day? Are you scrambling to pull dinner together after a long day with the kids or at work? Or do you feel confident that you have plans in place that will enable your family to relax and eat together? If you are hankering for something more than leftovers and want to save a bit of time and money in the process, then strategic meal planning might be a good step for you. Meal planning involves thinking through your week's meals in advance so that you can make the most of your money, time, and leftovers. To determine how well you are currently planning your meals, ask yourself the following questions: How often does food go bad or get forgotten? How often do you push aside something that you impulse bought from the store in order to get to one of your staple food items? How many times a week do you go to the store? Is this more or less than what you would be okay with? If you are dissatisfied with any of your answers, then you would benefit from strengthening your meal planning skills. Choose one of your favorite dishes as an example. I'm going to use spaghetti. What ingredients would you normally buy to make your dish? For mine, I would buy or make pasta sauce, parmesan cheese, spaghetti noodles, and meat balls. I would also want a side dish; most of the time I would choose salad. This is a great dish to start off with. There aren't that many ingredients, it's a fairly simple recipe, and you can do a lot to make multiple dishes based on these primary ingredients. For my spaghetti example, I can think of a few other dishes that would work with little to no extra ingredients necessary. In addition to spaghetti, I could make lasagna (just add a different pasta, spinach, and cottage cheese), pasta pie (pressing leftover noodles into the bottom of a pie plate and layering the other ingredients on top), and meatball subs. However, in order to make these ingredients last longer, I would change the side dish from salad to mixed vegetables. Salad in itself is a great base for numerous different meals; you can make Chinese chicken salad, Caesar salad, garden salads, and pretty much whatever else you can think of. However, to make the most of the meals that we have planned, I would rather switch to a more flexible side dish, like zucchini, squash, or carrots. These work well as a side dish in themselves, but they can also be used to enhance the main dish for the day. You can dice the zucchini and squash to add them to your lasagna or roast them with a thin layer of cheese for a side dish or a tasty snack. By getting creative with what you have on hand, and planning in advance to make different meals based on the same ingredients, you can save time, money and waste without much effort. Article Source: http://www.writearticles.org/ About Author / Additional Info: Comments on this article: (0 comments so far)
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