The Savvy Life

I work bad hours. I don’t get home until 7:00 at night and I don’t have a Suzy Homemaker Wife who has a meatloaf coming out of the oven as I walk through the door. It is one of the downsides of being a bachelor, I know. So menu planning is critical for me. I need to know before hand what I’m going to cook so I can get to it the moment I get home. Every minute of hemming and hawing means a minute later in the night that I will be eating dinner. Quite honestly, having dinner after 8:00 at night makes me really grumpy and I down right refuse to eat processed garbage: tasteless yet sodium filled microwave dinners.

The only way out of this trap is planning and prepping everything I can before I actually make dinner. An article over at organizedhome.com provides some guidelines on how to plan a menu and prepare shopping lists.

One of the best bits of advice from this article is the following:

Menu plans aren’t written in stone. So you’re dodging cramps on the “big” cooking day? Swap it out with Pizza Night and go to bed early with a cup of herb tea.

A posted menu plan promotes accountability, but family members will forgive you, as long as they get their postponed favorite a day or two later.

Build flexibility into your plan and serve the aims of thrift with Cook’s Choice Night. Traditionally held the night before grocery shopping, you can slide a neglected dinner into Cook’s Choice, or chop up the contents of the refrigerator for a clean-out stir-fry. Either way, you’ll feel smug at your frugality and good planning.

Never let a plan stand in the way of reasonableness. There are nights when my commute home takes a lot longer than usual and it throws my planned meal into chaos and I end up ordering take-out Chinese from the place across the street. Adaptability is key. Sometimes I’m just not that hungry and will be satisfied with some buttered noodles and peas. Other times I may be ravenous and the leftover pork chop isn’t going to be enough to sate my appetite – so I will have to whip up an extra side dish of some sort.

It started with a small head cold which left me with no real desire to write.  Then came Halloween party planning.  Then came post-Halloween hangovers and feeling of malaise as the weather turned all cold and nasty.  Before I knew it, nearly a month has flown by and I haven’t written anything for The Savvy Life… I didn’t even bother to do what I’m doing today and point people to other places on the web that are updating and providing some fun and vital information.