Prep on Sunday, Eat All Week - First week was a success!

I just wrapped up our first official week of "prep on Sunday" menu planning and family dinner nights. I'm happy to say it was a success!

I planned my menu on Friday during nap and then made the grocery list Saturday.
I was super tired Saturday due to very little sleep Friday night, so I postponed grocery shopping to Sunday morning. Got home from shopping on Sunday, had some lunch, and then set to work prepping.

Here's what the menu looked like:

Sunday - out with friends
Monday - Parmesan-Ranch Chicken, roasted garlic red potatoes, green beans (YUM!! Will for SURE make this again. and again)
Tuesday - Tuscan Beef Stew with biscuits (good, simple, will make this again)
Wednesday - Healthy Mama BBQ Chicken with rice (meh, bland. Nothing inherently wrong or gross, but we won't make it again)
Thursday - leftovers/takeout
Friday - Meatloaf, garlic bread, green beans
Saturday - family birthday party with dinner there

For my Sunday prep session, I labeled 3 gallon size ziplocs, one for each of the first 3 recipes.

I did the Parmesan-Ranch Chicken prep first. I took the chicken out of the freezer put it in its labeled ziploc to defrost in the fridge. In a small tupperware, I combined all ingredients for the breading for the chicken and set that aside on the counter where I would need it the next night. I then set a reminder in my phone (thank you, Siri!) for Sunday night to pour the ranch dressing marinade into the chicken bag once the chicken was defrosted.

Next I turned my attention to the BBQ Chicken and the Beef Stew, my crockpot meals for the week. I put the stew meat into the Beef Stew ziploc. I then scrubbed and chopped the red potatoes for the BBQ Chicken, setting some aside to be roasted as a side for Monday night's dinner. Next I chopped all veggies and put them in the appropriate bags, either BBQ Chicken or Beef Stew. Once the veggies were in, I added all the sauces, stock, and seasonings. Then sealed the ziplocs and set them in the fridge. I set another reminder on my phone for Tuesday night to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost for the BBQ Chicken. I didn't want to defrost it early in case we ended up not being able to make the chicken Wed. night as planned.

3 dinners chopped, sauced, prepped, and packaged within 40 minutes. I have to say I was impressed with myself when this was done.

The week stayed true to the menu, and the time between getting home from work and sitting down to dinner was really smooth!

On Monday night I turned on the oven as soon as I got home to pre-heat. I purposely picked a recipe that needed less than 30 minutes bake time. This meant I had 20 minutes to hang out with Kaleb before needing to get the chicken in the oven. When it was time to put dinner in, I just had to dump the breading on a plate, pull the chicken from the fridge and dredge it, then pop in the oven. I then dumped the red potatoes from their ziploc into a roasting pan, drizzled with EVOO and sprinkled with garlic powder and parm, these went in the oven with the chicken. This 'prep' took me less than 5 minutes, that was completely manageable! I heated the green beans when Kyle got home. This dinner was a for sure win and is absolutely in our regular rotation now!

Tuesday night, I got a call from day care at 5 that Kaleb had a fever and was saying his tummy hurt. He was clingy and whiny when we got home and we got him into bed early and scrapped the family dinner thing. Kyle and I did enjoy the beef stew and it was really nice having dinner just in the crockpot ready to go. I was able to freeze half the leftovers, which will be really nice for a night I need something quick but don't want to do takeout!

Wednesday Kaleb was tantrumy and clingy and I was super prego-tired. We still did family dinner, but weren't all that impressed with the recipe. All considered, it was still nice to have dinner be easy enough/prepped enough that we could still do family dinner even when I was completely exhausted.

Thursday we did delivery pizza, because someone at work that day had done a pizza day and when I'm pregnant, once I smell/hear about/see someone else eating something then I can't forget about it and I must have it.

Friday is my new flex day, which means I have time at home to make a recipe that doesn't lend well to being prepped on Sunday. This week I did meatloaf, one of Kyle's favs. I like having this day to experiment with new recipes that maybe take a little more fuss.

Tonight is my niece's birthday party so we are having dinner over there.

My menu for next week is planned, the grocery list is ready for shopping tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to the sense of accomplishment I'll feel tomorrow afternoon when my week's worth of family dinners are prepped and ready to go!

At this stage in the game I feel like it is a tad early to be sharing my menu planning winning strategies, what with this being only my second week :) But, after another week or two under my belt, I'll be sure to share how the logistics are all working out!

Family Dinner: Lessons Learned During Week 1

Last week was the first week of my "Family Dinner Every Night" commitment and I'm happy to say I made it happen :) It was really awesome to sit around the table as a family, all of us eating the same dinner at the same time together! For last week I just stuck with easy dinners that I knew wouldn't require much prep. I think I had committed to 2 or 3 nights, since I hadn't grocery shopped for a ton. My menu plan going into last week was primarily planned around what we already had in the house.

Here is what our menu ended up being:

Mon: White chili with biscuits (I cooked the chicken in the crockpot with a jar of salsa during the day then just dumped the rest of the ingredients in when I got home from work)
Tues: Manicotti with garlic bread and salad (when I made manicotti a few weeks ago I made a double batch and froze half, so I defrosted over night then baked when I got home from work)
Wed: we had a visitation for a friend's mother that night, so it was leftovers
Thurs: Frozen chicken strips with rice and green beans (I got stuck late at work)
Fri: Frozen pizza (I had planned beef stroganoff, since I'm home on Fridays now and can do more involved dinners. I was going to shop for ingredients after Kaleb's nap that day, but his nap ran until 4:30 and the roads were getting nasty)

So, while I nailed the "eat together every night" part, I have plenty of room to grow on the menu planning and weekly prep areas.

The main challenge I faced was trying to balance getting dinner prepped, cooked, and on the table while also managing a toddler who wanted and deserved my undivided attention. I did choose dinners requiring minimal prep, but that prep needed to be done right when we got home so dinner could finish cooking in time for 6:30 serving. I already have a standing expectation of myself as a mother to provide my children with undivided access to my attention during the first 10 minutes (minimum) that we are home and together again after a long day of being separated at work and day care. The deserve this time and I am not willing to make any lenience on this so my menu planning will need to work around and with it. Lesson learned here, do as much prep the weekend before as possible and plan meals that don't need my attention the minute I walk in the door from work.

Another challenge that I still need to think more about was the fact that Kaleb wants to eat right when we get home. His new day care does snack at 3:00, so he's hungry again when we get home. A hungry toddler equates to a child with zero patience and even less tolerance for frustrations. I don't want him hungry, but I also don't want him having these huge snacks and then not eating dinner. I don't for sure know the best way to overcome this. For the coming week I am going to make sure I have a healthy snack packed for him to eat in the car on the way home from day care. This will give about an hour and a half between the car snack and dinner, which should be enough time for a growing boy to get hungry again.

A third challenge I ran into: getting caught up at work at least one night last week past my regular end time. This is going to happen, so my menu planning needs to take this into account. Lesson learned here: take my weekly work calendar into account when planning the menu. If I am scheduled for late afternoon meetings and/or training sessions then I need to have dinners that don't need bake times aka crockpot stuff.

The final challenge was simply not having planned the menu and then gone grocery shopping. Last week I worked in reverse, having already shopped before I decided to commit to the family dinner plan. I don't know that I can call this a "lesson learned" since I already could have told you it makes much more sense to menu plan before grocery shopping.

It was really rewarding to have my family sit down to a nutritional (most nights) homemade dinner each night! I was pleasantly surprised to see Kaleb sampling everything each night. I was nervous that I'd find out this past week that I had already created the monster and it was too late now for him to adapt to family dinners where he eats what is served and doesn't get to demand other things.

I'm going to start a separate post to share my plans for this week.

**I just went and read last week's post, looks like I hadn't actually committed to starting the family dinners until this coming week. So, I'll give myself a pat on the back for implementing a week early and cut myself a little more slack on last week's menu :)

2012 Goal: Family dinners

Right now, I see to it that my family eats dinner every night, and that the dinner they eat it is nutritional (with a little leniency every now and again on that front). The only issue is, we don't eat all at the same time. Kaleb eats his dinner at 6:30, while I sit with him and talk to him. Then Kyle and I eat our dinner after Kaleb is in bed. Timing-wise this has just been easier. When I get home from work I'm able to just be with Kaleb and not be focused on prepping a dinner for all of us to eat. Also, we just kind of evolved into this routine since Kaleb as an infant and young toddler was on a totally different schedule than we were for eating. However, my goal of this year is to figure out how to make eating dinner as a family every night a reality.

Kaleb is 2 now, and his schedule is predictable and can be easily aligned with ours. He is also more capable of entertaining himself while I prep and cook a meal. I have the mom-thing a little more under control now than I did when Kaleb was in his first year. I am also starting a new schedule at work, where I will be out of the office by 4:45 at the latest every day, which means I'm home by 5:15 or 5:30 reliably. If I aim to have dinner on the table by 6:30 each night that gives me an hour from start to table. With some forethought as to menu, and maybe even a couple hours during Sunday nap time spent chopping veggies and prepping sauces, I think this is a reasonable and doable undertaking. I know working moms across the country pull it off, and there is no reason I can't as well.

I'm giving myself this week to lay out my menus and my shopping plans. I will do my main shopping trip next weekend, and then that following week I am committing to at least 2 nights of family dinner at 6:30. I already have a decent rotation of crock pot dinners, and a nice collection of go-to quick dinners. And with the combination of an internet full of recipes, and a group of other moms I know who do family dinners, I'm going to be able to pull this off.

I am hoping that, by starting now, I'll have myself on a routine well before the baby comes (only 9 more weeks!!!). I expect some slacking on the family dinner qualities during those first few weeks (pizza, takeout, etc) but will also maybe have discovered some great freezer dinners I can prep during that week I'm on maternity leave before he arrives. Then it will be summer and we'll be into the always-easier cooking season of grilling almost all our dinners.

It is important to me that my boys grow up in a home with family dinners every night. I am excited to see how far I've come on this goal by this time next year!