If you are the person or one of the people responsible for meals in your home, sometimes it seems like you are always in the kitchen instead of your creative space.
In order to get more time in my sewing room, I meal plan. It’s not my favourite thing, but there are many beneifts. So, I do it.
One trick is to prepare ingredients for a bar style meal that will cover several nights in a week. It is a bit more work upfront, but it is great when you need or want to make meals and cleanup faster every night.
Benefits
Preparing ingredients ahead means you just throw them together at meal times and don’t have to think too much. You can keep the bar private and just use it as your personal pantry for the week to make one meal for your household every night. But, if you are cooking for others, everyone can have fun creating their own meal. My baby is eating solids and the ingredients I prepared from scratch have no added salt or sugar so it is easy for me to make her plate, too!
Choose a base
First pick a base for your meal. Usually, I choose a starch, but a protein can also be the star! Rice, potatoes, chili, pizza crust, eggs, quinoa, pasta or anything else you want. I chose pasta for this week, but if we get sick of that, we can introduce another base to add more variety.
To simplify, every night I cook one kind of pasta for everyone. It is the blank canvas that everyone gets to personalize and create with after.
Sauces
Then, you choose which sauces, if any, you want to offer. I find it helpful to think of different dishes or cuisines to give me ideas. I thought of different pasta dishes I have had before.
Cheeses
This can add a lot of flavour and dimension to your meal, but if you don’t eat cheese, I’m not watching. Do what you want!
Meats and substitutes
Some of these things have been hanging around the freezer or fridge and need to go. Here I have chicken, mild Italian sausage, beans, bacon and ham. You could add anything, like ground beef, leftover pork roast, peperoni or tofu.
Veggie Toppings
Whatever is in your fridge and on sale that week. I like to focus on veggies. Onions, peppers and mushrooms are pre-cooked, but tomatoes and spinach are left raw. I added a few jarred items for variety.
Herbs And spices
Again, I like to think of different cuisines and what makes their flavour profiles special. For example, if I was going to make a greek flavoured pasta, I’d probably add oregano or dill.
One of our meals
Here is an example of some of our not very glamourous, but real life creations (read on to find out why there aren’t more photos).
A Twist ending to our pasta bar
After painstakingly preparing all these ingredients, do not knock your container on the basement fridge shelf and drop it on a concrete floor. This happened on day two of our culinary adventure. Please ignore my Birkenstock and tights look. The food and work gone to waste is the real tragedy. Looks like we’re having Gatorade the rest of the week.
I am sad I ruined the pasta bar for many reasons. A good amount of work was put into it. We were having fun discussing our ideas for the next few nights’ combinations. And now I have to cook something else this week. This setback will not keep me from using this meal prep method in the future, though!