Get ready, get set, eat at home!
Many of us have the goal to cook and eat more meals at home instead of eating out or buying convenience foods. And it’s not hard to get in the habit of cooking and enjoying your own delicious meals at home, but it’s easy to overlook one of these three simple steps.
Step 1: Meal plan
If you enjoy surfing Pinterest for recipes or leafing through stacks of cookbooks to find meals that pique your interest, wonderful! But if you don’t, no worries. Most weeks my meal plan consists of this activity: writing down the five or seven meals I plan to make for evening meals that week. That’s it! I write Monday through Sunday on my chalkboard (see photo) and fill in a quick schedule of the meals I plan to make. Sometimes I write whole meals, like “pork stir fry with rice” and other times I just write the protein we’ll have with the meal, like “lamb sausage” or “chicken” that you see here.
This does not have to be fancy or take long. Just think of some family favorites that you enjoy eating and write them down. The order doesn’t matter a lot, but if you’re going to use leftovers from one meal to create the next, you’ll want to put those in order (like my plan to have “chicken” followed by “chicken soup”).
When it comes to meal planning, remember what Eisenhower said (referring to battle, but meal planning can feel like a battle!): “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” Even if I change my plans, having an idea for each day’s meal is super helpful!
Step 2: Defrost
This is the step that often gets overlooked! I’ve noticed a huge stumbling block to my actually prepping the meals I intended to make comes when all of my protein is frozen solid. Since you buy meat from local farmers, you may have this problem too, as your meat is all in the deep freeze and not fresh and waiting for you in the fridge.
The solution for me is to get a big bowl out of the cupboard, fill it up with the frozen meat I want to eat for the week, and stick it in the fridge. Done! Each morning, I’ll check on my planned protein for the night. If it’s still as hard as a rock, I’ll set it on a plate on my counter to thaw more quickly during the day to be eaten that night.
When I first got a deep freeze and a bunch of meat from the family farm, I’d end up eating all the ground beef first because it could easily be thawed in the microwave at the last minute. Now I plan ahead and we eat steaks, roasts, and other yummy cuts along with our ground beef all year.
Step 3: Cook!
The final step to cooking and eating at home is to cook and eat at home! Just make it a routine on the nights that you want to cook at home. Turn on some music, hand any housemates you might have a cutting board and a knife, and work together to enjoy the process — and the results! Yum-o. There is nothing like a home cooked meal!
Get started with your three steps now with some cuts of meat from our farm store!
