Dinner Thoughts: A Meal Planning Newsletter

Procrastiplanning—A Guide

Welcome! I’m Megan Scott, co-author of the 2019 Joy of Cooking, and this is Dinner Thoughts, an often-as-I-can-manage-it newsletter about meal planning. In it, I share my weekly meal plans and thoughts about how to cook sustainably. Read on for specific guidance and tips, galaxy-brained thoughts about intuitive cooking, and literal meal plans that mirror how my household eats every week.

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Lest you think I am more organized than I actually am, this week I wanted to share how to procrastinate and meal plan because it can be done! You’ve probably already figured out that I’m procrastinating this week because it’s Wednesday and I’m just getting around to sending this email out :/

My very cool friend, Heather Arndt-Anderson, made this bloody Mary on our beach trip. The skewer is made from a willow branch.

I spent most of last weekend at the Oregon coast with friends soaking up a very unusual sunny (but super cold) January weekend, clambering in and out of a hot tub, drinking bloody Marys with very good pickle skewers, and stargazing. As soon as I got back on Sunday afternoon, I had to shift into podcast mode and record an episode. After that, I was too tired to do anything but play Stardew Valley, eat a Trader Joe’s freezer meal (kung pao chicken with added veggies), and sink into bed.

Somewhere between Stardew Valley and dinner I managed to scrawl down a list of ingredients we already have in our fridge, pantry, and freezer, but that’s as far as I got. I started to mull things over in the meantime and by Monday morning, John and I had decided to make Roberto (Helen Rosner’s very good soup of Italian sausage, white beans, tomatoes, and greens) because we already had all the key ingredients.

Throughout the day, I managed to come up with two more meal ideas, which gets us to Thursday. And, hey! That’s not bad! That bought me two whole days to noodle on Thursday and Friday’s dinners, and by then we might even have enough leftovers for a freebie. Magic!

Our fridge this week after getting a CSA delivery. We are condiment people, so our fridge is a crazy place. You never know what’s going to fall out when you open it.

It’s not always necessary to do meal planning in one sitting. You really only need to figure out tomorrow. The obvious downside to this approach is that, if one of your meal planning goals is to take fewer trips to the grocery store, this method may not accomplish that unless you have a very robust freezer and pantry (a strategy that really works well for us but ymmv—I’ll write more about pantry-stocking in a future newsletter because it’s truly what keeps this whole process sane for me).

This Week’s Meal Plan

Notes:

• We were doing really well with our CSA carrots this winter until the past couple of weeks and now we’re overrun. So, if you have any really awesome carrot recipes, please share in the comments! (Help.)

• Spigarello is a less familiar cooking green that I’ve started seeing in local markets the last few years. It has fleshy leaves and tastes very much like its parents, broccoli and kale. It’s great any way you’d normally use cooking greens: sauteed, thrown into a pot of soup for the last few minutes of cooking, etc.

• I did not eat the pizza with the protein shake. The protein shake was consumed at home and the pizza at the theater. Man cannot live by pizza alone (though there have been phases of my life when I acted like this wasn’t the case), and I didn’t have time to fuss with cooking anything, so I housed a protein shake. Sometimes you just gotta feed yourself and not overthink it.

• The potato crunchy tacos are happening tomorrow, and I’m really excited about them. A podcast guest described them to us—a flour tortilla and a crunchy taco shell or tostada cemented together with melted cheese, filled with chunky mashed potatoes, and topped with a bracing carrot and serrano slaw. CARROTS!!!