what to eat... what to eat

You'd think making a grocery list would be a simple task. Alas, it is not. Most of you ladies out there know that it is a lot of prep work. You have to look at your calendar at the beginning of the week, think about your upcoming plans and decide which days you'll need to cook (some nights B has class, some nights we go out with friends, some nights you can eat leftovers, etc). Once you decide how many nights you'll have to cook, you start thumbing through your recipes. So I'm a tad on the OCD side. Okay a lot. I have a HUGE binder of recipes I've collected over the years (from magazines, websites, friends, family, etc) and they are organized alphabetically by category (appetizers, desserts, meats/poultry, mexican, etc).

So you if you have 4 nights this week that you have to cook you think to yourself, "I am going to try to cook healthy meals, with variety, try a few new things, and also try to appeal to my husband's tastes... who could eat mac/cheese every night and be happy." So I pick out a pasta dish, grilled chicken recipe, a veggie soup, and a new fish recipe I've been wanting to try. My rule of thumb is to only do 1 new recipe a week. That way if it bombs, it's okay because the other nights we will be having tried and true classics. So once you have your recipes, you have to start thinking of sides. This stresses me out to the max. Like with this fish recipe, which veggie would be best? Asparagus? Salad? Wait, we are having salad with the pasta on Monday. AHHHH. Sides stress me out.

SO... once you have your main dishes and sides picked out, you have to rummage through your fridge and pantry to see what ingredients you already own, then add the items you don't own to your grocery list. THEN you gotta rifle through your coupons (online and cut from the paper), and that's no fun.
Finally... you go to the grocery store. Despite all the build up, the grocery shopping is actually fun to me. My sweet hubby goes with me 90% of the time so we can tackle it together and accomplish it in 1/2 the time. And it's fun bonding time.
Then you get to eat your delicious meals and look back on all the hard work you put into planning the meals for the week. Oh and at the end of every meal, Brian and I rate the food on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the most delicious thing in the world) and I write the average of our numbers in the top left corner of the recipe and place it back in the binder. So when we go back through and find that we gave that recipe a 9, we'll know we should eat it again. Don't worry, I toss the recipes that score anything below a 7.