In the pages that follow, you will find a complete menu plan for a week's worth of tasty and nutritious vegetarian meals. Use our menu plan "as is" or modify it to meet your tastes. See for yourself how a little planning can make mealtimes manageable and delicious.
THE MAGIC OF MENU
PLANNING
It may seem that nothing could be easier than a dinner of broiled steak, baked potato and green beans. However, a vegetarian meal of baked yams, steamed broccoli and sauteed tofu is every bit as easy. Preparing vegetarian meals really doesn't require any more time than preparing omnivorous meals -- only time spent more wisely. Planning your meals in advance also ensures that your time in the kitchen is spent wisely so you can make wonderfully delicious and creative dishes -- even on a limited time budget.
How often do you walk into the kitchen at 5 p.m. with no idea of what to fix for dinner? Think about the problems this creates. Ten minutes are wasted just deciding what to cook. Fumbling to find the right recipes takes another five minutes. Then five more minutes are spent figuring out a game plan and how to work around the ingredients that are inevitably missing. The result: twenty minutes of your precious time are gone, and you haven't even set pan to burner.
THREE STEPS TO A
MENU PLAN
To avoid these frustrations, try the simple remedy of planning your meals in advance. Menu planning is a simple process that involves just three steps:
1 Decide what to eat. Once each week or two, sit down with pen and paper, and write down what you will eat each night.
2 Find the recipes. Locate each of the recipes that you need and place them in a handy spot in the kitchen.
3 Make a shopping list. Review each recipe or item in your menu plan and prepare a grocery list.
With this kind of preparation, you walk into the kitchen at night with confidence instead of dread, and you spend each minute actually cooking a healthful vegetarian meal rather than fumbling to make do with what's on hand.
Menu planning has another benefit besides making meal preparation more efficient. With a menu plan, it's easier to delegate responsibilities and get the help you deserve because everyone can readily see what needs to be done. For instance, an older child or spouse can easily see if a pot of rice needs to be started for dinner, or a salad made, or some vegetables chopped. By having a written shopping list, it is also easy to delegate the weekly grocery shopping to another household member or a shopping service.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
The week-long menu plan in this article was created with Dinner!, a menu-planning computer program, together with its vegetarian supplement, Vegetarian Express: Easy, Tasty, and Healthy Menus in 28 Minutes (or Less!), by Nava Atlas and Lillian Kayte (Little, Brown and Company, 1995). A computer program like this can make it easy and quick to plan your meals -- and fun too. Additionally, the final result is a neat and organized print-out of your menu plans, recipes and shopping lists.
High tech is certainly not a prerequisite for planning meals, however. The job can also be accomplished using a piece of paper and pen or an erasable drawing board. Simply draw a grid with a column for each day and a row for each meal. Alternatively, write each day,s menu plan on a separate index card.
Once you have completed a couple of menu plans, begin recycling them to make the most of your planning efforts. Using index cards makes it particularly easy to reuse your meal ideas. Simply reshuffle the cards into different combinations, creating one or two new cards as necessary for variety.
Whether you use a pen and paper or high technology, however, the results of menu planning are the same. By writing a menu plan, collecting the right recipes and purchasing the right ingredients, you can eat the way you want whenever you want. Try it. We think you'll like it.
THE MENU PLANS FOR
BREAKFAST
How often do you make breakfast one day and use leftovers the next day? Breakfast doesn't have to be left out of the "planned overs" program any longer with these recipes. Pancakes and oatmeal make it easy.
THE MENU PLANS
FOR BREAKFAST
SUNDAY
Multigrain Pancakes
with Fruit Sauce
With the help of a ready-made pancake mix, it is entirely possible to enjoy a Sunday morning treat of piping hot pancakes. Be sure to make enough pancakes for Monday's Strawberry Pancake Rollups. For the rollup pancakes, thin the batter with a little extra liquid so they will be easier to roll. Cool on a rack and refrigerate in a plastic bag until they are needed.
Begin by cooking the fruit sauce so that it can simmer while you make the pancakes.
Author: Mary C. Rogers
Previous article: 03 November 2007
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