this is how i cook

I used to hate making dinner. There were several ways I made it harder for myself and the way I do things: 1. I thought the problem was trying to come up with ideas (because I tried to make unique meals every night for two or three weeks) so I tried a few different dinner planning programs to see if that would help, but they ended up requiring hours in the kitchen for every meal. 2. I thought I needed to start by picking recipes and then put all the ingredients on my grocery list, which lead to complex meals with a lot of ingredients and long lists. 3. I had a complicated interpretation of what a “meal” was. It had to be interesting and have a lot of variety. It was like I thought all our meals had to be like going to a different nice restaurant every day. 4. I have a list of food sensitivities, so most recipes I would have to modify quite a bit to make them work for me.

Turkey bacon, sweet potato with
almond butter, kale and peppers.

With all of these restrictions on meal planning, I found it overwhelming and mostly didn’t plan dinners. So we just had whatever I could put together last minute, which was just stressful in a different way.

Over the last nine months I’ve revamped the way I think about dinner and it’s made a huge difference for us. We sit down to dinner together almost every night and I’ve gotten into a routine that works for me. I do go to the grocery store a lot, but some of that is more to do with the fact that we eat a lot of fruit and veg and I can only fit so much in the fridge at a time. Our kids eat a lot guys, it’s ridiculous.

So here is my “new” method (which might be everyone else’s regular method and I’m just late to the party):

First, I keep a variety of meat that we eat often in the freezer. I get it at Costco and I try to have some combination of chicken, ground turkey, shrimp, salmon, beef and turkey burgers, sausage and sometimes red meat of some kind. I do the same thing with carbs and vegetables. We usually have brown rice, potatoes, quinoa, corn and peas, spinach, tomato, red pepper, zucchini, green beans and some kind of squash.

Chicken, zucchini, brown rice

Seared ahi tuna, brown rice,
kale and peppers.

Then I pick something to start with. It’s often a protein, but occasionally I have a spaghetti squash or specialty thing I want to use so I’ll work around that. Then I see what’s in the fridge and decide how I’m going to season it and what to put with it. The main thing is that I keep it to a simple protein, carb, veg combo and add in whatever extras we have. The other day I had some ripe mangos and I thought that would sound good with spicy shrimp, so I did chili lime shrimp with cilantro lime rice, cole slaw and mangos. Last week I had a lot of zucchini, which the kids don’t love. So I shredded it and mixed it in with chicken cooked with Italian seasoning, brown rice, red peppers and cheese. I put a lot of zucchini in and the kids ate it up! If I want to cook ground turkey I look and see if I have avocado or corn or other things that go with taco seasoned meat. Or maybe I have potatoes and green beans so I do meatloaf.

Chili lime shrimp, green beans with
pine nuts, cilantro lime rice.

Zucchini boats with taco meat.

I have found that keeping the house stocked with ingredients we like and then just paring things together based on what we have and what I’m in the mood for is much easier for me than planning out specific meals. We end up eating a lot of similar things (like you'll notice from my pictures that brown rice is popular with me), which isn't the problem I once thought it was. It's actually really nice because we eat what we like, and isn't that the way it should be?