When Justin and I lived in Korea it was really expensive to eat out. Also the food was terrible. Just to clarify, I enjoy Korean food, but American Korean food and the stuff you find in Korea is really different from each other. But besides that any place that spoke English served “American” food- which was terrible. So it was really disappointing to go out and eat terrible food. One night, it might have been our one year anniversary dinner, we went out to have fancy Italian food. “How could anyone mess up Italian food?” I thought naïvely to myself. It.Was.Terrible. Justin and I looked at each other and shared a thought, We can cook better than this. And we started trying.
We had cooked a little before, but now we had goals and were ambitious in our cooking. We attempted all the types of food we couldn’t find overseas. We had Italian, (American) Chinese, Mexican, and good old fashion foods we perfected like hamburgers, pizza and steak. We felt proud and excited that we MADE food and it was good!
Fast forward, we are back in America and can once again get good food- but it’s still expensive, so we try to cook at home 99% of the time. The catch, living with my parents we also share a kitchen with them and have very, Very different views on food. Things like how much fridge space should be taken up by condiments, and how long food is still editable, and what constitutes a meal. After basically giving up eating anything but cereal Justin and I were grumpy and missed our own cooking.
I had always planned on cooking for all four of us when we moved in with them. Partly as a way to say Thank You, partly so we would all eat healthier, and mostly so I would have edible food (I was familiar with my parents cooking after all). But somehow it didn’t Just Happen, and if we didn’t start cooking soon enough one of my parents would start cooking something which usually involved boiling foods way past when it was done. We needed a plan.
Meal planning was the obvious choice, but I wasn’t going to pay a website to give me recipes that I might not like or know how to make (and you know, saving money not paying someone else to save me money). Even thought it would be nice to get grocery lists and meal schedules delivered… Justin and I thought we could do it ourselves. We would start with meals we had made before, I had some recipes from when I started writing them down for our family cook book that I was penning. We made the schedule for the first week, made the shopping list, went shopping and settled on a dinner time.
I didn’t even feel like cooking dinner the first night, but Justin encouraged me and lead the way with cooking- dinner was awesome. We had everything we needed to cook a good, tasty dinner and it was ready before 8:00pm. Success was sweet.
Day two, I think I was more helpful but I really couldn’t tell you, you’d have to ask Justin. Dinner was tasty again AND our ulterior motive we had leftovers that made for a tasty, non-sandwich lunch!
The week continued, Justin and I giddy with non-cereal, non-sandwich nourishment. Saturday came and it was time to make the next week’s schedule and shopping list again. That’s the part I’m worst at, not that I’m good at getting dinner started either, but I’m still worse at the planning (unusual for me, I know). Justin led the way again and we had a list and a plan. We got to the store late the next day though and I over salted the sweet potato fries that night into in-edibleness.
Monday rolled around again, and while I knew how good dinners could be now, I was already drained by cooking starting at 5:30 and clean up ending somewhere around 8:30-9:00. It was my whole night. Mom gets a free pass b/c she already did this for years, plus she has work at 4:00AM, and her body hurts. Dad offers to help cook or clean, usually I let him but when he does the dishes they come out kind of oily still and just need to be rewashed. And Justin has homework most of the time, so I end up cleaning. I kind of can’t imagine having a young family that needs attention and doing this every night, forever.
Week three started today. We ordered pizza and both took naps.
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