Dinner Thoughts: A Meal Planning Newsletter
How many frozen pizzas does it take to screw in a meal plan?
When John and I moved into our home in 2016, it came with a garage freezer. It felt like being inducted into some sort of club. I grew up in a two-freezer household (in the way that things used to be made to last, the freezer of my childhood is still chugging along in my mom’s carport despite being rust-covered due to the humid Southern weather), and I watched my mom pull hunks of meat, gallons of ice cream, and other gelid miracles from its maw multiple times a week.
My mother also used the freezer as a cache for deals. Never one to pass up a great bargain, she would make a circuit through the meat department at our local Winn-Dixie hunting for discounted pork tenderloins and ground beef. Sometimes the meat made its way directly into the Crock Pot for dinner, but it went into the freezer more often than not.
I don’t shop for meat deals as much as my mom did, since I’m not raising three children, but I do view the garage freezer as a kind of doomsday vault for weeknight dinners, the doomsday in this case being a really long day at work or a creative dry spell when I cannot think of anything that sounds delicious. The freezer usually yields up something—if not an entire meal, then at the least a generative spark.
I keep a few types of foods in my freezer: raw ingredients, resilient leftovers, and pre-made foods. Raw ingredients include gochugaru (the cardinal-red Korean chile flakes used in kimchi) really good cornmeal I buy from a mill in Western North Carolina, and a giant bag of walnuts.
My stash of leftovers includes chicken chili verde, braised collard greens from a cookout last summer, and sauteed chanterelles. As for the pre-made goods, we’re rarely without our two favorite Trader Joe’s meals—teriyaki chicken and kung pao chicken—but also tamales, vacuum sealed slices of meatloaf, and at least three kinds of dumplings (and, of course, frozen pizza!).
Peering into my freezer is almost as guaranteed to give me a dinner idea as flipping through a cookbook. The freezer also makes a Costco membership worthwhile, but that’s another story.
This Week’s Meal Plan
Notes
We’re eating out more than usual this week due to John’s dad visiting. Bluto’s is a great little Greek-inspired place, and Ox is one of our favorite special occasion restaurants in Portland. It’s the only steakhouse I’ve been to where the vegetable sides are as good as the meat.
We’ve started making this glazed potato banchan on the regular. It’s getting us out of our roasted potato rut (not that there’s anything wrong with being in a roasted potato rut).
Links!
In our last podcast episode, we chatted about how to use up preserved lemons with culinary card game creator and illustrator Jordan Mishra Johnson.
Tariffs are set to decimate some of our favorite small businesses, so we’re stocking up on our favorite ingredients: toasted sesame oil from Yun Hai; cured sumac, peppercorns, and purple stripe garlic powder (among other things) from Burlap & Barrel; turmeric and cardamom from Diaspora Co.
Living small means a little more planning—no space for a second freezer here. Loved this post, though! So helpful for those of you who do have one. It’s all about making the most of what we’ve got, right?