Welcome to my annual recipe
crush. Each February I choose a theme, and provide one or two recipes each day
for the whole month. It gets exhausting, so that’s why I picked the shortest
month!
Each year I go into my file
of possible themes for this month and choose one. It was a no-brainer this
year. Every family cook—man or woman—whom I know, struggles with putting meal
after meal on the table day after day, week after week, and month after month.
Me, too!
Working full time and being
the main cooker for the family stretches your creativity, right? That’s when it
hit me. One way to not just survive but thrive in meal prep is to systematize
it. That’s my go-to for most areas of my life, so why not cooking family
dinners? This month is inspired by a women’s magazine I used to subscribe to.
It had a monthly menu, something new each night, so that, were I to choose to
use it, I never had to wonder “What’s for dinner?”
I’d make the grocery list
for the week and cooked the foods they described and gave recipes for. Did I do
it each night? Nope, but often enough at one period in my life so that the
stress of “what’s for dinner ?” was off my plate, so to speak. I carried that
on later to planning our camping meals (no Safeway nearby; we had to pack it in)
or for extended family/friend visits. Even now, I make weekly menus to take
advantage of leftovers and to vary our meals.
What if you had some tried
and true recipes that you simply rotated on a regular schedule and added on a
focus for each day so nobody has to ask what’s for dinner? This is “Taco
Tuesday” or “Fishy Friday.” With one or two recipes from here each day, you’ll
have a month of rotatable recipes. And your family will know what to expect.
So here’s the plan. I will
provide you with at least one recipe each day in a category. By the end of the
month, you can make a calendar for the month of different recipes. With your
own family favorites and the inevitable leftovers, I’ll bet you could stretch
it to two months.
You might even make one
Friday a month, a take-out or order-in dinner. Then, with your plan in front of
you, you just cook away each day. By the end of two months, you start over,
repeating the recipes from the beginning. That way, with the distance between
dishes, your family will never again ask, “Spaghetti again?”
You’ll notice many of the
recipes are “thrifty” or “worldly” (ethnic) or “fishy” despite the category I
assigned them to on the blog. That means you can move them around to give even
more flexibility.
What are the categories,
you ask? We have Sunday Special, Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Worldly
Wednesday, Thrifty Thursday, Fishy Friday, and Celebrate Saturday.
Come back on the first of
February, and we’ll begin our Month-of-Easier Meals. Well, the easier planning
of them, anyway. And you know me, they will be easy. I don’t cook hard!
Facebook post: Looking for quick, easy recipe ideas your family will eat? Check out
the Month-of-Easier meals by Sharon Arthur Moore at “Parsley, Sage, and
Rosemary Time” http://bit.ly/2Dwraep
Twitter post: Looking for quick, easy recipe ideas your family will eat? Check out
the Month-of-Easier meals by @ Good2Tweat at “Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time”
http://bit.ly/2Dwraep
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