Cooking every (week)night

I'd fallen out of the habit of cooking on any kind of schedule and it was starting to wear on me. I know I'm perfectly capable of planning meals and making a weekly grocery list but I just couldn't dredge up the energy. So I made the somewhat impulsive decision to jump start myself by committing to cooking a different meal five nights a week for the month of June. This was largely dictated by the fact that I found this four week meal plan* and realized that I could execute the cooking without having to spend any time pondering it. It's the pondering that gets me.

We're just over two weeks in and I can tell you that cooking five nights a week is officially too much for the two of us but because I'm stubborn I'm sticking to it, mostly, and just eating leftovers for breakfast and lunch.

{(not) meal planning}

{pasta and tomatoes - recipe here}

{udon and pork - recipe here}

{lemons and potatoes - recipe here}

{ready to roast - recipe here}

{prepping - recipe here}

{ravioli and white wine - recipe here}

I think it's working. I won't say that all these recipes are my favorites but they're quick and simple and some will definitely end up in rotation. All I do on Sundays is check the pantry and figure out what items I want to buy where (weekly shopping lists are included with the plan). There's significantly more meat than we normally eat, so it's killing our grocery budget, but I can survive that for a month. It's completely brainless, which is exactly what I needed. But I think I'll be ready to go back to real meal planning next month.


* You have to download the shopping list and then click through the slideshow to get to each recipe to print it out. Yes, it is annoying that they don't have it all in one PDF. Just open the recipes in new tabs and print everything out in order.