Category Archive

meal planning

Offbeat Home Cooking Challenge, Day 1 recipes: Bagels, curried egg salad, and spaghetti

Today is Day 1 of Offbeat Home’s Cooking Challenge, wherein we see if Offbeat Bride’s Managing Editor Megan, a complete non-cook who lives off of frozen pizza and cereal, can go an entire week of preparing her own meals.

When you need a fridge full of leftovers, make jambalaya

My partner and I have demanding schedules, and there are many weeks where we can only cook one or two nights. That means we rely heavily on leftovers to get us through. We both love trying new recipes, but when we don’t have time or energy to come up with something new, we come back to one recipe that we’ve found is versatile, healthy and keeps well as leftovers.

Helen Jane finishes her meal planning lesson

We already talked about my thought strategies and meal planning, now it’s all about the listing. Like I said, I list out all the foods that we have that I want to use up. Then, I list out all the recipes I’ve seen that I want to make. Then, I list the ingredients I need to get at the store. But there’s more to it than that.

How to plan for a week of meals

I plan my meals every week.
It saves me time and money.
It helps me visualize when I’ll need extra help, or when to scale back or when to pull out the fancy forks (Just kidding, I don’t have any fancy forks. Do you?)
It keeps me from wasting food.
It takes less than 15 minutes a week.
So, what are you having for supper tomorrow?

I dreaded grocery shopping, but it’s my household job: how I made my chore less loathesome

I really, really dislike grocery shopping. It seems to take time out of my day and stores are hard to navigate and I always forget what I need and blehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I never want to do it.

But friends: NO LONGER!

Not since I made a system — everything I dislike doing is better with a system which removes the barriers to success. Now I finally have a grocery system — or at least most of one.

Make better use of your kitchen’s resources to waste less food and save more money

Wasting food is a bummer. It’s a waste of money, it’s a disappointment, and it can be prevented. Here are eight ways to waste less of your precious, tasty, delicioso food.