Article and Photo Courtesy of Organized Christmas
Holidays ahead ... and that means the feast is on us! Will you be ready
to make memorable holiday meals?
Even experienced cooks can quail at the idea of cooking a holiday meal.
Who hasn't run out of butter, curdled the gravy, or found themselves holding
back an entire meal while waiting for one last item to finish cooking?
Not this year! The secrets to stress-free holiday meal preparation?
Planning--and sharing the work!
Today's the day we break out our printable holiday meal planner forms,
and organize those big dinners and festive brunches. Better, we'll consider
ways to delegate and simplify holiday meal preparation ... for an organized
Christmas.
To Do Today
Print the 2 menu planners:
Here are addition menu planners that can be used throughout the year:
Plan holiday meals
Thanksgiving is a few days away: it's time to sort out holiday menu
plans! While we began last week by planning Thanksgiving dinner, today we'll
make menu plans for the rest of the season's festive meals.
Why? Because this week and next will see the year's best bargains at
the supermarket! Holiday non-perishables such as canned pumpkin, cranberry
sauce, frozen desserts and freezer rolls will be offered for sale as "loss
leaders" in most grocery stores.
Knowing what you'll need for the rest of the season's special meals
lets you stock up now ... and save!
To begin, print a free printable holiday menu planner or designate a
fresh sheet of paper for each holiday meal that will take place in your home.
Thanksgiving Day? Christmas Eve? Christmas Day? New Years? Give each
at-home meal a good hunk of space on the page for menu planning.
Next, use a potluck meal planner to list those meals that you will take
away from home.
Christmas brunch at Grandma's? A holiday pot-luck at church? If you'll
need to bring a dish, note it down.
Once you've sorted out all the when-and-where issues, it's time to plan
the meal itself. What will you serve--or delegate!--at each holiday meal?
Tradition has its advantages: if you always have turkey with cornbread
dressing on Christmas Day, you't have to decide on the menu from one year to
the next!
Consult cookbooks if needed then list every element of the meal:
Appetizers
Relishes
Entree
Side Dishes
Vegetable
Salad
Dessert
Beverages
Can you delegate any of these items to guests or family members? Mark a
big "D" next to the dish, and add a name.
Finally, turn to your list of "away" meals. Have you
coordinated your contribution with the host and hostess? If not, call and
discuss what you'll bring. A proactive hint: decide what you'd like to prepare,
then call and offer.
Positive action frequently means you won't get stuck making individual
sweet potato casseroles cooked in hollowed-out orange shells. She who offers
first, smiles to the end!
Menu Planning: Save Time in
the Kitchen!
New to menu planning? Come up to speed on menu and meal planning with
tips from sister site, Organized Home.
What's for dinner? It's the question of the hour!
Too many home managers look for answers in the supermarket at 5 p.m.
Harried from the day's work and harassed by by hungry children, they rack their
brains for an answer to the what's-for-dinner dilemma.
Three meals a day. Seven dinners a week. From supermarket to pantry,
refrigerator to table, sink to cupboard, the kitchen routine can get old, old,
old.
No wonder we hide our heads like ostriches from the plain and simple
fact: into each day, one dinner must fall. What's the answer? A menu plan.
Menu planning doesn't have be complicated! Planning meals ahead
requires a small investment of time, but can reap great rewards:
A menu plan saves money. Reducing trips to the supermarket, a menu plan
reduces impulse spending. Using leftovers efficiently cuts food waste, while
planned buying in bulk makes it easy to stockpile freezer meals at reduced
prices.
A menu plan saves time. No dash to the neighbors for a missing ingredient,
no frantic searches through the freezer for something, anything to thaw for
dinner.
A menu plan improves nutrition. Without the daily dash to the
supermarket, there's time to prepare side dishes and salads to complement the
main dish, increasing the family's consumption of fruits and vegetables.
Knowing what to serve each day--and having the ingredients already on
hand--cuts back on the drive-through habit.
Follow these tips to put the power of menu and meal planning to work
for you:
Dare to Do It
For too many of us, making a menu plan is something we intend to do . .
. when we get around to it. Instead of seeing menu planning as an activity that
adds to our quality of life, we dread sitting down to decide next Thursday's
dinner. "I'll do that next week, when I'm more organized."
Wrong! Menu planning is the first line of defense in the fight to an
organized kitchen, not the cherry on the icing on the cake.
Take the vow. "I, [state your name], hereby promise not to visit
the supermarket again until I've made a menu plan!"
Start Small and Simple
Still muttering, "But I don't wanna ..."? Break into menu
planning easily by starting small and simple.
Think, "next week." Seven little dinners, one trip to the
supermarket. Sure, it's fun to think about indexing your recipe collection,
entering the data in a database and crunching menus till the year 2015, but
resist the urge.
Slow and steady builds menu planning skills and shows the benefits of
the exercise. Elaborate hoo-rah becomes just another failed exercise in home
management overkill.
Where to start? The food flyers from your local newspaper, or sales
circulars from your markets' Web sites. You'll use the ads to get a feel for
the week's sales and bargains. They'll be the basis for the week's selection of
dinners.
This week in my hometown, two local chain supermarkets are offering
whole fryers for the low, low price of 99 cents a pound. Clearly, this is the
week for Ginger Chicken and Fajitas, not a time to dream about Beef Stew and
Grilled Pork.
Menu Planning Basics
Okay, it's food ad day. Time to rough out a simple menu plan.
The goal is two-fold: shop efficiently to obtain food required for
seven dinner meals, while minimizing expenditure, cooking, shopping and
cleaning time. Here's the overview of the process:
Scan the food ads (newspaper or online) for specials and sales. Rough
out a draft menu plan: seven dinner entrees that can be made from weekly
specials, side dishes and salads.
Wander to pantry and refrigerator to check for any of last week's
purchases that are languishing beneath wilting lettuce or hardening tortillas.
Check for draft recipe ingredients. Review your shopping list and note needed
items.
Ready, set, shop--but shop with an open mind. That 99-cent fryer won't
look like such a bargain next to a marked-down mega-pack of boneless chicken
breasts at $1.29 a pound. Be ready to substitute if you find a great deal.
Return from shopping. As you put away groceries, flesh out the menu
plan. Match it up with the family's calendar, saving the oven roast for a lazy
Sunday afternoon, the quick-fix pizza for soccer night.
Post the menu plan on the refrigerator door. Refer to it during the
coming week as you prepare meals.
That's it! The bare bones of menu planning.
You've made a draft plan, shopped from a list, retained flexibility in
the marketplace, firmed up your plan and held yourself accountable.
The devil, however, is in the details! Use the pager links below for
some points to ponder as you bring menu planning under control.
Build A Personal Shopping List
Planner companies, gift shops and generous desktop publishers all
compete to produce cute little shopping lists for all persuasions and
occasions. Bear-shaped shopping lists. Long skinny shopping lists. Shopping
lists with winsome graphics, kittycats and teddy bears. Awwwwww.
[We even offer some, too, in our library.]
Because they don't work, that's why. Teenaged sons play stuff-the-hoop
with the empty cereal box and the trash can, but have you ever known one to
neatly write "Cheerios" on the list? Blank shopping lists fit about
as well as one-size-fits-all clothing.
Solution? Build a pre-printed family shopping list on the computer,
listing all the foods and sundries your family consumes. Print 52 copies each
year. Post them on the refrigerator. Boys who don't circle "cereal"
on the list when they empty the box must eat hot cereal for the rest of the week.
Make your list work for you: organize it by aisle. Next shopping trip,
grab a hand-out supermarket map as you leave. Construct your personal shopping
list according to the order you shop the store. You'll speed your way out the
door in record time!
Coast in the Calm of a Routine
Yes, there are some well-organized souls among us who don't make formal
meal plans. Look close, and you'll discover that household meal service dances
to a routine.
Sunday's a big dinner, and Tuesday gets the leftovers. Monday is burger
night, and Wednesday sees spaghetti, year in and year out. Thursday's the day
for a casserole, and Dad grills on Friday. Saturday night, it's take-out or
pizza.
Create a routine around your menu planning. Sure, you can try new
recipes--just don't let your enthusiasm for the cookbook trick you into doing
so more than twice a month.
Find cues in the family schedule to help you plan a routine. At-home
days with more free time can handle a fancy meal--or can signal soup,
sandwiches and Cook's Night Off. The night you drive the sports team carpool is
a great time to plan for pick-up sandwiches. Make the routine yours, and it
will serve you well.
Consider Cook's Choice
Build flexibility into your plan and serve the aims of thrift with a
weekly Cook's Choice Night.
Traditionally held the night before grocery shopping, "Cook's
Choice" is a menu planning catch-all designed to account for real life.
Use it to tie up loose ends before the next round of menu planning.
You can slide a neglected dinner into Cook's Choice, or chop up the
contents of the refrigerator for a clean-out stir-fry.
Either way, you'll feel smug at your frugality and good planning.
Stay Flexible
Menu plans aren't written in stone. So you're dodging cramps on the
"big" cooking day? Swap it out with Pizza Night and go to bed early
with a cup of herb tea.
With meals planned and ingredients on hand, it's easy to juggle your
menu plan when circumstances require. Staying flexible--while being
prepared--brings calm to the kitchen!
Make It A Habit
Simple or not, a menu plan won't help you if you don't make one. Weekly
menu planning is a good candidate for a new habit: an action on
"auto-pilot" that you engage in without thinking. Need to learn how?
Check out Habit, the Household Wonder Worker as a guide to building new habits
for an organized home.
Get into the habit of planning menus before you shop, and you'll get
hooked on the ease and convenience--an addiction of great value!
Recycle Menu Plans
After you've made menu plans for a few weeks, the beauty of the
activity shines through: recycle them! Organized by main ingredient--chicken
breasts, say, or chuck steak--completed menu plans make it even simpler to plan
and shop for a week's meals.
Tuck completed menu plans in a file folder or page protector in your
household notebook. Next time fryers are 99 cents a pound at the market, pull
out the plan you made this week. Done!
Group Plans by Season
Over time, weekly menu plans will setting into two major groups: menus
for warm weather, and fall/winter menus. Try to assemble six to eight plans for
each menu "season"; most families do well with that much variety--and
no more.
For instance, a great special on ground beef signals grilled hamburgers
and burrito bar during warm-weather months; spaghetti or cabbage rolls during
the cold season.
Include both variations in your menu stash for re-use next time you
spot ground beef at a bargain price--whatever the weather!
Make the Move to Monthly Menu Plans
Once you've flexed your menu planning muscles with a few weekly plans,
consider moving from weekly to monthly menu plans. It takes only a few more
minutes to add the additional three weeks to your plan; doing so saves time all
month long.
Longer-term menu plans are slightly more complex, relying as they do on
freezer and pantry. But by reducing trips to the store--and maximizing use of
food on hand--they bring superior savings and convenience.
Build Your Pantry Power
Longer-term menu planning brings new emphasis to household food storage
areas: refrigerator, freezer and pantry.
Brush up on your pantry power with our Beginner's Guide to Pantry
Pride; keep tabs on stored foodstuffs with free printable pantry inventory and
freezer inventory forms.
Maintaining an organized pantry offers many advantages for the menu
planner. Keeping stocks of bought-on-sale staples lowers food bills and speeds
meal preparation. Unexpected guests are no problem when you can turn to the
pantry or freezer for hospitality supplies or a pre-prepared entree.
Today's Recipe
aunt bills brown candy recipe
It's a special holiday candy with a down-home Oklahoma history: Aunt
Bill's Brown Candy.
With the texture of fudge and flavor of caramel, this ultra-creamy
treat is studded with plump pecans for an unbelievable taste treat. In our
family, Aunt Bill's Brown Candy has been a seasonal tradition since the 1930's!
For experienced candy makers only ... but the result is heaven! Also
known as Oklahoma Brown Candy or Sooner Brown Candy, but in my house, it
wouldn't be Christmas without the Aunt Bill's!
Aunt Bill's Brown Candy
Ready for a unique seasonal taste treat? It's Aunt Bill's Brown Candy!
With unforgettable caramel flavor and bursting with plump pecans, this
old-fashioned cooked candy is a Sooner tradition in the state of Oklahoma--and
it's been a family favorite in the Ewer household for five generations!
Not for the inexperienced candy-maker, but for those with a good
knowledge of candy-cooking, it's a heavenly holiday treat.
Ingredients
6 cupssugar, divided
2 cupslight cream or half-n-half
1⁄4 teaspoonbaking soda
1 cupbutter, unsalted
1 teaspoonvanilla extract
2 poundspecans, shelled (about 8 cups)
Instructions
Combine 4 cups of sugar and the milk or half-n-half in a large, heavy
saucepan. (Rub the sides of the saucepan with butter, to help prevent
graininess.) Stir and set aside.
Put the remaining 2 cups of sugar in a large iron skillet over medium
heat. Stir constantly until the sugar starts to melt. At that time, place the
sugar-milk mixture over low heat, stirring occasionally until the sugar
dissolves.
At the same time, continue melting the sugar in the skillet, stirring,
until all is melted and it is the color of light brown sugar. Melting sugar
scorches VERY easily, so watch carefully. The entire process may take almost 30
minutes; at the end, you want one pan of light-brown melted sugar AND the
milk-sugar mixture at a very light simmer.
The next step requires family teamwork. Pour the melted sugar into the
simmering milk-sugar mixture in a stream "no bigger than a knitting
needle". Stir constantly! This step may take five minutes, and works best
if someone strong pours the melted sugar v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
Continue cooking the combined mixture to the firm ball stage (246
degrees; higher at high altitudes), do not stir, other than to scrape the sides
of the pan occasionally.
Remove from the heat at once. Stir in the baking soda--the candy will
foam vigorously, so call the children to watch this step. Plop the butter into
the foaming mixture, and let everything stand without stirring for 30 minutes.
Add vanilla and beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture stiffens and
loses its gloss. This process may take 10 to 15 minutes, so beat in turns with
your helper . Add the pecans, stir to mix, and turn the candy out into a
buttered 13-by-9-inch rectangular pan.
Let the candy cool until barely warm; cut in smallish pieces--it's
rich.
Notes
This candy is a wonderful keeper if each piece is wrapped in aluminum
foil, and the wrapped pieces stored in an airtight container.
Aunt Bill's Brown Candy is traditionally sent by the women in our
family to family members serving in the military. It's sturdy, keeps well and
won't be damaged in transit--and brings an unforgettable taste of home to our
family members in service.
