Earlier this week my daughter volunteered to make Lo Mein. It’s her favorite thing to order at a Chinese restaurant. She saw a picture of it in a magazine ad and got the idea to search online for a recipe. It came out great; the house smelled like a restaurant when I got home from work.
This is how we’ve learned to fill out our food calendar each week (and how I cut my dinner making responsibility in half). Sometime Saturday, usually at the dinner table, each child and the husband says what they want to cook the next week and which day, and that goes onto the calendar first. If we won’t be home together at dinner than we do it earlier but sometime Saturday it happens. You can print calendars from TimeAndDate.com.
First, my husband is not home from work in time to make dinner on weekdays either, so he needs to either pick something he can mix the night before, for example, salmon patties or meatloaf, or he needs to pick a weekend day. If he cannot pull off dinner on his day, then he can take us out – but that day is his and no one else needs to worry about preparing dinner on that day unless it was planned ahead.
The kids have music, sports, and other extracurricular activities on the calendar. They each pick a day that they have available to make dinner; I never schedule my kids to have an activity every day of the week. Kids can make something for dinner by the time they’re 10-11 years old, even if it’s scrambled eggs and toast. The first three weeks my son signed up for dinner, he made hot dogs and frozen sweet potatoes. Even though they were beef franks from the farm, I finally said, “That’s it, nice try, you’re never making us hot dogs again.” I told him he had to pick a recipe to follow each week, either out of the cookbook, search online, or off the back of a package.
The kids decide what they’re going to make by looking in the freezer or cupboards for ideas. After a while it gets easier because they have a few favorites and they come across ideas on their own. It’s a learning experience and a process. Sometimes my son would just make some lame recipe on a package, like the simple one that just tells you how long to cook fish in the oven to get it up to temperature. But we worked through that — this is a whole meal and we expect something good on his day just like we get the rest of the week. Another thing he tried was to just make one thing. So you’d get your dinner and have this plain, white piece of warm fish on your plate with no vegetable, salad, or anything. We resolved that by saying on the weekly calendar you state your main dish and your side dish. It takes some prompting. If they say they’ll make pasta, I ask, “What kind and what are we going to have with it?”
Then I say what I’ll make the other four days, and hopefully a couple days will be left overs. Next we compare the recipes on the calendar to what groceries we already have and compile our grocery list which we will fill sometime Sunday. When the farm markets are open, I might stop on the way home from work one day and stock up on produce for a week. Then we fill those items in on the calendar first and everyone fills in their meal suggestions around it. That way we use up the fresh, local farm produce we already bought so it doesn’t go bad.
Also, the kids call me at work every day after school and I ask them what’s on the menu for today, so no one forgets it’s their day and they need to get organized. This whole process is also great for learning to follow directions and to plan, based on cook time, to make sure everything finishes at the same time. You can imagine that it takes some practice and it’s worth it. Also, once in a while we have a slight disaster and end up either going out for dinner or moving to Plan B, which is to have vegie burgers out of the freezer. We keep a couple boxes of something similar to Organic Sonoma burgers in the freezer because they have no soy, gluten, or dairy and taste pretty darn good.
I also have my son keep track of whether he practiced violin or trumpet on the same calendar and that’s how I determine whether he can use his Kindle, so there are very sparse Vs and Ts on the same chart. We’re flexible with the calendar if something comes up and we need to switch days or postpone a planned dinner, that’s fine. You can search online for any format of calendar that works for you and bookmark it. We printed the rest of the year in advance since months fly past.
