How to Give Yourself a Break
Show yourself some love by simplifying dinner
Over the past week or so I’ve noticed several newsletters and podcasts talking about ways to simplify cooking, rather than motivating all of us to cook more and better and healthier in 2023.
I love this trend!
People are tired. Instead of soldiering on and pretending like everything is great, we’re collectively saying that resting and connecting with the humans we love is more important than optimizing every aspect of our life.
Home cooks are often told that in order to give yourself a break you first need to work harder. Batch cook soup and chili and put it in the freezer! Spend Sunday cooking so your meals are prepped for the week! Spend hours strategizing a meal plan that turns every recipe into two different meals!
This approach might help your week run smoother, but it’s a perfect example of optimizing, not simplifying. You aren’t giving yourself a break. You’re just doing all of the work up front.
So let’s talk about a few ways to truly simplify dinner and meal planning. On any given week you can choose what work best for you.
Short and Medium-term solutions
Eat out more
Subscribe to a meal kit delivery service
Eat more frozen food (hit the Trader Joe’s frozen section!)
Buy short-cut ingredients, like pre-cooked chicken or sausage, cut vegetables, frozen rice, marinated meat, and bagged salads with dressing included
Make peace with very basic dinners (ideally ones that your kids can make on their own) like pasta and jarred sauce, sandwiches, ramen, quesadillas, simple salads, bread, cheese and fruit, etc..
Longer-term solutions
Renegotiate a cooking schedule with your partner, so you each have nights “off”
Renegotiate a kitchen clean-up schedule with your partner, and/or start having your kids help out more
Rely on the greatest hits - Choose five meals that your family likes and that you can make without too much effort. Keep these meals on repeat.
Stop following recipes* (see below)
*How to Stop Following Recipes
Instead, focus on techniques. Learn a few basic cooking techniques so you can buy protein (chicken or salmon or pork chops or tofu) and then cook the protein without following a recipe.
Season the protein with salt and pepper or buy a few spice blends for more flavor. Chopped fresh herbs are also an easy way to flavor simply cooked meat and fish.
Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything cookbook series is great for learning basic techniques.
If you can do this, then you can make a meal plan that looks like the one below. I often scratch this meal plan out in the car while I’m sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store. Or, you can just do it in your head as you shop and see what’s on sale.
The idea is simple: write down 5 proteins, 5 starches and 5 vegetables. That’s your meal plan for the week. Each night, use a simple cooking technique to make dinner.
For example, roasted chicken thighs and potatoes with steamed broccoli.
More Inspiration
Didn’t I Just Feed you Podcast Episode 227: How to Get Your Cooking Mojo Back
Edible Living Newsletter Family Dinner, Yes Day Style
Dinner Last Week
I’m always curious about what other families are eating. Aren’t you? Here’s what my crew ate last week.
Monday: After a weekend of not-so-healthy food, I was craving veggies. I roasted three sheet-pans of vegetables and made Glory Bowl dressing. My husband and I ate veggie-loaded salads and the kids had grilled cheese and nibbled on some vegetables.
Tuesday: The easy tofu marinade was good. My broccoli and bell pepper stir-fry was just okay. I really need a good, easy stir-fry recipe if anyone wants to share one! We also ate Bibigo chicken & cilantro mini wontons that I bought at Costco. They’re okay, not amazing, but very convenient for dinner.
Wednesday: Kielbasa and sauerkraut served with egg noodles and sour cream
Thursday: On Thursdays, we often don’t eat dinner until 7:30pm because I’m at karate with the kids and my husband works late. The hubs picked up dinner at Kismet Rotisserie on his way home and we ate really delicious chicken with hummus, chili oil and garlic sauce. The sides were citrusy carrot slaw and couscous with tomato, sumac and dried mint. I loved the bold Israeli flavors that tasted really different from our usual fare.
Friday: I took off for the weekend (!) and spent two days with a dear friend, enjoying the sunny but brisk weather in Santa Barbara. A little bit of walking and biking balanced out all of the eating and drinking we indulged in. I’m still dreaming about that almond croissant at Dart Coffee Co.
Cookbooks & Reading
This cookbook is dedicated to one-pot/pan meals, which means less clean-up! Yay! Keeping it Simple by Yasmin Fahr gives you fairly simple dinner recipes that are colorful, flavorful and never boring.
Even if you don’t think you’re a poetry person, you should read Kate Baer. And sit next to a box of Kleenex while you do it. Her poems about modern motherhood and womanhood always get to me. She writes about love and rage and loss and beauty. You can read her books in one sitting, and then read them again and again.
And Yet is her third book, I also loved What Kind of Woman. You can read an interview with Kate Baer here.
Please note that book titles in this section are Bookshop.org affiliate links. Your cost for purchasing the book is the same, but a small portion of your purchase will come back to me and help support my work. When ordering from Bookshop.org you’ll also be supporting independent bookstores.
Hope you have a fun, long weekend. We don’t have anything planned. Which sounds perfect.
xo
Jenny