Planning for success, one sticky note at a time
My monthly menu planning hack, Whole30ish style
The first meal we had after Per’s Bell’s palsy diagnosis was at an amazing place in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, called Greystone Castle. The name alone may conjure images of white tablecloths and amuse-bouches. But, true to the best of Wisconsin restaurant traditions, you’d walk in to find mounted taxidermy on the walls and the pot roast sandwich heralded as famous on the menu. The meal we shared featured multiple forms of deep-fried cheese, potato wedges with sour cream, cheeseburgers, and a fried fish sandwich.
The next day, Google led us to the promise of an anti-inflammatory diet, and we started to root through pantry and refrigerator in search of compliant food.
Over the course of a few hours, we had some version of this conversation multiple times:
“Can we eat this?”
“No!”
“Really? It’s made with lentils / chickpeas / brown rice.”
“No. It’s processed / has added sugar / is made from grains, which aren’t compliant, even if they are whole grains.”
It quickly became clear that we needed a better plan.
To make it through the first week, we cobbled together a quick selection of proven favorites—made a batch of hummus, ate chicken with vegetables, chicken with hummus, vegetables with hummus, and generally felt a lot better than we expected after a few days. And also, maybe predictably, got a little bored.
Which is why New Year’s Day found me with a cookbook I’ve been meaning to explore—Mark Bittman’s How to Grill Everything (nutritionally appropriate if not exactly seasonal)—and a pack of sticky notes, planning our meals for the month.
We happened upon this technique in the early days of COVID, when I was immunocompromised, and people were still wiping down grocery deliveries, and before restaurants had pivoted to takeout. Miraculously, it turned out that menu planning for a whole month is easier than doing it a week at a time—you just write down a bunch of meals you know the family likes, a few you want to try, and a few things you’ve been meaning to use from the freezer.
Then: sort them.
(Lesson learned: it’s way faster to sort than decide.)
Revisiting this process over the past few days revealed another surprise: how many of our regular meals rely on pasta, rice, cheese, and/or butter.
This made populating sticky notes a lot more challenging than I expected. It also reminded me of the last time I successfully “reset” my diet, back when I was trying to get pregnant with the twins. Getting through the recommended three months of the fertility diet (lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains) meant branching out into new recipes—many of which are still favorites today. And doing so ultimately—finally—ushered in the twins.
This time around, I found myself leaning into ChatGPT: “Find some chicken recipes that would go well with Girl & The Goat green beans with fish sauce aioli and cashews.” I’ll let you know how the resulting Thai-inspired chicken skewers go. I’ve even seen people posting about having ChatGPT create an entire weekly meal plan based on dietary preferences and including a shopping list! I hope somebody tries this and lets us know how it goes.
Despite all the potential means of assistance, at the time of this writing, the meal plan currently sits in a state of half-completion; and since we already know what we are having for dinner, it’s the commitment to post this blog on the first of the year that is driving me to ultimately finish it.
“I find I am much more accountable to other people than I am to myself,” I remarked to a friend at brunch earlier today, and we agreed on how easily that can become the case.
So, I’m offering my thanks to each of you for the role you’re playing in this endeavor this month—I got it done (!) after breaking for dinner. I’m confident we’ll be moving the stickies around plenty over the next few weeks, but it’s a lot easier to edit than it is to start from scratch.
Coming next will be a few of the tried-and-true recipes that helped us kick things off successfully. Maybe if you sit down this weekend with a pad of stickies, you’ll decide you want to try one of them?
Happy New Year, and happy eating!
P.S. Tonight for dinner, Per made Lemon and Garlic Chicken with Cherry Tomatoes from NYT Cooking, with a side of sautéed zucchini. They put most of their recipes behind paywalls. I’ll share what I can here when I can find it elsewhere, but if you like to cook, it might be worth treating yourself to a subscription; it’s the only one for which I pay, and I’ve never been disappointed by a five-star recipe.
Your commitment to share your healthy eating journey is super exciting! I’m reading regularly, feeling inspired to join you and ready to try some new recipes. Thank you!
When you’re ready to digitize your sticky notes, try a ‘kan ban’ board app. Kan bans are used typically by software developers but are great for exactly this. We’ve been using trello for years and now have a decade worth of favorites in there.