fails to plan

I am back to not knowing exactly how to plan so we have enough healthy food for all of our meals for the week.

I started with meal -planning myself. This left me with way too much or too little food, leftovers that were too repetitive... With two people it is hard to cook four meals in a week. You will end up with way too many leftovers unless you do some major recipe-halving magic. If you cook two or three meals a week and try to eat leftovers, trust me, you will want something else by the time Thursday and Friday roll around.

I thought that http://www.thefresh20.com/ was the answer. We tried this for a while. This is a GREAT concept, but the recipes just aren't very tasty. After being burned several times-- buying all of the ingredients and making meals that were just too unappealing to eat--we ended up eating canned spaghetti sauce on pasta or going out for fast food more nights than I would have liked. I think for something like this to work it would have to be a lot more tailored to the preferences of the family (sounds a lot like meal-planning myself).

Lately I have been trying to get back to the gym. Until this week with a nasty cold, I have been pretty good about it, dutifully making the gym my first stop on the way home from work. This leaves me energized and feeling good about myself, but STARVING when I get home at 6 or7 p.m. and in no shape to whip up a home-cooked meal. We fell into our old rut of frozen entrees and eating out, so I tried http://www.myfitfoods.com/. This is a great crutch for weeks when you can't cook. It's pretty tasty, healthy food. It is reasonably priced ($60 bought us a week's worth of healthy dinners for way less than we would have paid eating out), but the food is a little too spicy and a little TOO healthy to be our everyday routine.

Here I am complaining, so let me use this four-step plan from this month's O Magazine:
1. Pushback: Planning myself week after week isn't working, and the easy ways out aren't tailored to our food preferences. They are too overly healthy for us to eat every day. I'm not interested in deprivation--we're not trying to lose weight, just be healthier and eat real food.
2. Possibilities: The most outrageously awesome possibility I can think of is having my own cooking classes (or maybe even a TV show!) for newlyweds and other newly grownups who need to learn to cook healthy everyday comfort food. It would be my full time job to plan out healthy meals, I would become awesome at it, and I would probably have a staff to cook my own recipes for me when I didn't feel like it ;).
3. Preferences: It seems like I prefer having the time to become more awesome at this. And I probably do. I think the secret is concentrating on the time that I WANT to spend cooking (and there is a lot of it) so we'll have something to eat when I DON'T want to cook. It could be a whole new project...
4. Pinpoints: These would be the little ways in which I could make the above happen. I can think of a couple:
a. spend time perfecting a few seasonal meal plans (3 each for winter, spring, summer, fall would cover a whole year!) that cater to our preferences. I could publish these here... maybe with some step-by-step instructions for basic techniques. The best way to learn to cook is to COOK! I have learned so much through Abby/Betty and this would be a good new project.
b. spend time when I do have time to cook making some easy, frozen, heat-uppable healthy meals for us. I like an idea from this month's issue of Martha Stewart Living (not yet available online that I can find) for making TV dinners to freeze--salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, spinach, berry crisp. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say healthy comfort food. It's healthy enough (carrots, spinach) but comfort-foodie enough (because this girl grew up on meat and taters and I'll never feel satisfied by a diet of all steamed veggies and quinoa!!)

New project in the works for Abby?? Maybe...