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Abstract

Sunday — Chicken</li><li>Monday — Soup</li><li>Tuesday — Pork</li><li>Wednesday — Potatoes</li><li>Thursday — Pasta</li><li>Friday — Leftovers or Take out</li><li>Saturday — Pizza</li></ul>I built it this way because it fit with the general shape of our week. I do most of the cooking except for Sundays, when my partner is responsible for dinner. He picked chicken because it’s easy to find a wide-variety of simple recipes. (It’s also easy to pull out emergency food from the freezer when he forgets.)Mondays I make soup because then we have easy leftovers for lunches for the rest of the week. By Thursday I’m often sick of cooking and it’s a relief to last-minute an awesome pasta dish.You know the flow of your week. The calendar gives you permission to work with it and around it. Maybe you have a Ancient Grains night or Seafood if you’re on the coast.I prefer to eat vegan but health-wise that’s not an option these days; I’m looking forward to being able to sub-out the meat somewhere down the line for Scramble or Bean night. What it looks like is totally up to you.<h1 id="5147">3. It Sparked More Variation Through Better Memory</h1>A major point of my initial resistance to a plan was I absolutely cannot eat the same thing multiple times in a row. Or even multiple weeks in a row, which is the more common way “food plans” are put together. But our calendar kept the categories broad enough that it never felt like we were eating the same thing all the time.Quite the contrary — because I knew we’d probably be having pork only one night, I could easily think back on the last two or three Tuesdays and remember that we’d had, for instance:<ul><li>spiced tenderloin</li><li>pork chops in mushroom gravy</li><li>sausages</li></ul>Time for pulled pork!<h1 id="aabb">4. It Prompted More Inventive Use of Leftovers</h1>It’s always nice to have some leftovers in the fridge to fall back on, but simply reheating the same meal bores me. (Why yes, I am a novelty-seeking person.)The outline of our weekly meals encouraged me to look ahead and see how leftovers could fit in. Say we had roast chicken on Sunday, with plenty of meat left to pick off the bones. I could use it the next day for soup. I could save it for Wednesday and only have to make gravy and mash potatoes. I could toss it with fettuccini on Thursday.Less prep, next-to-no planning, but more variety. You’re welcome.<h1 id="9538">5. It Reduced Waste</h1>Because I had a general sense of what each dinner looked like ahead of time, I could forecast which groceries or leftovers we needed to use now and which ones we could easily use for a meal further along the week.If Thursday rolled around and we still had stew from Monday night and sausages from Tuesday, I knew I should chop the sausages and toss it in the pasta, because Friday we’d be finishing the stew off. If there was still chicken in the fridge come Friday, I knew exactly how old it was and made sure it got eaten that day.The days of pulling out a container of leftovers and trying to puzzle out when

Options

it was made or whether it was now a science experiment were left behind.<h1 id="6fb0">6. It Gave Structure to a Simple Recipe Book</h1>After a month I actually got around to putting 3 to 4 of our favourite meals for each day into a small, hardcover notebook. I’d been thinking about putting one together for years, but wasn’t sure how to organize it.Yup, you guessed it: it’s arranged by weekday.Instead of feeling like I have to reinvent the wheel every week, I have something to fall back on. Some of these recipes are classics from my mother or grandmother. Others are odds and ends I collected over the years. A few favourites I salvaged from older cookbooks that are on the verge of falling apart and ready to be tossed.I still look up new recipes all the time to try out. Those we really like (eventually) make it into the book. I don’t have scour several cookbooks to find that one recipe I want to try or vaguely half-remember.Does it have potatoes? Then it’s probably in the Wednesday section.Now, each day has a mix of easy recipes and a couple of “showstoppers” for when I’m feeling fancy. Putting the book together initially took less than an hour or two and it saves my sanity — and a lot of time — every week.<h1 id="88ce">7. Closing Off Options is Liberating</h1>Rereading what I’ve written so far makes me feel like Betty Crocker. Please believe me when I say: I love eating but I hate thinking about food. I would rather think about almost anything else. Right now I would rather be replaying the last thrilling scene from a novel I’m reading about lesbian necromancers in outer space. Doesn’t that sound more fun?The best part about the food calendar is that I think about food prep for about three minutes every day instead of gazing into the abyss of unappeasable appetite. I can run the grocery store without a list and still do a quick mental check to make sure we have at least one option for each day. Soup? Check. Pork? Check.My toddler is learning about choices. If you give her an open-ended question, say, “What do you want to eat?” you are not likely to get an answer. But if I ask, “Do you want apples or cucumbers?” She’ll pick one. Or she might say, “No, crackers!” But either way we can now move on with our lives.I’m not sure our brains are built for infinite options. They’re much better at making small choices, even if the parameters are artificially created. Right or left? Thai or Sushi?What kind of pasta should we have for dinner? is a far easier question to answer.The calendar isn’t rigidly written-in-stone law, and we definitely substitute meals or swap days when it makes sense. But by having a prompt and foreclosing on options, I can make quicker decisions and move on to the things I really want to think about.Maybe you start with Pizza night, like we did, and go from there. It’s certainly worth a try. At the very least it won’t be any worse than opening the fridge and looking straight through the chaotic contents to the yawning void beyond.</article></body>

7 Unexpected Things I Learned When I Made a Food Calendar

Monday: soup. Tuesday: pork. Wednesday: potatoes.

Well-being is a balanced state that floats between chaos and rigidity, according to neuropsychiatrist and mindfulness expert Dr Daniel J. Siegel. Too much chaos and life feels tumultuous, out of control. Too much rigidity, and life quickly becomes lacklustre.

What’s for dinner? For me, the open-ended question was a sea of chaos. Asked daily, it prompted an abyssal absence of thought. A vague but enveloping dread. An irrational fear that all suppers henceforth will be identical and unfulfilling.

Yet the rigidity of your typical meal plan is equally repugnant. I actually love to cook but I absolutely hate to plan. Improvised meals worked well for years because I had an unstructured and untethered life. Then I had a kid. Then my kid had some food intolerances. Then Covid hit, and I could only get out to the grocery store once a week.

I found that way too much of my brain-space was being eaten up thinking about what to cook. I felt resentment towards my partner, whose idea of “helping” is a non-committal wave and the oft-repeated “affirmation,” What ever you make will be great. You can’t eat What Ever, mofo. You gotta think of something.

I needed to balance the chaos with the rigidity. Enter the food calendar. It’s only a tiny exaggeration to say it saved my mental health. It also may have saved my relationship (the verdict is still out) but it definitely isn’t hurting.

1. It’s Like a Writer’s Prompt

For longer than I should have, I took a Thermopylae-style stand against the idea of food planning. I like things impromptu; schedules are anathema. Then a book made a small suggestion that didn’t feel too constricting: pick one special night, like a Saturday pizza night.

Ok, I thought. That’s doable. My partner was on board because he’d be happy eating pizza every night.

Pizza night quickly became an inspiration, rather than a obligation. There are lots of ways to approach it. Pizza can be store-bought, though we usually do hand-made. Pizza can have a cauliflower crust. It can be pizza buns, a staple in my family growing up. It can be a mountain of veggies, gourmet, or good ole cheese and pepperoni.

We started to take “pizza” in the broadest sense — it’s probably more apt to say “flat-bread night” but that doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Pizza was merely the muse. The alpha, not the omega.

2. You Can Match Your Calendar to Fit Your Flow

Pizza night went so well that it was only two weeks before we made a full-week calendar, Sunday to Saturday. Ours looks like this:

Sunday — Chicken
Monday — Soup
Tuesday — Pork
Wednesday — Potatoes
Thursday — Pasta
Friday — Leftovers or Take out
Saturday — Pizza

I built it this way because it fit with the general shape of our week. I do most of the cooking except for Sundays, when my partner is responsible for dinner. He picked chicken because it’s easy to find a wide-variety of simple recipes. (It’s also easy to pull out emergency food from the freezer when he forgets.)

Mondays I make soup because then we have easy leftovers for lunches for the rest of the week. By Thursday I’m often sick of cooking and it’s a relief to last-minute an awesome pasta dish.

You know the flow of your week. The calendar gives you permission to work with it and around it. Maybe you have a Ancient Grains night or Seafood if you’re on the coast.

I prefer to eat vegan but health-wise that’s not an option these days; I’m looking forward to being able to sub-out the meat somewhere down the line for Scramble or Bean night. What it looks like is totally up to you.

3. It Sparked More Variation Through Better Memory

A major point of my initial resistance to a plan was I absolutely cannot eat the same thing multiple times in a row. Or even multiple weeks in a row, which is the more common way “food plans” are put together. But our calendar kept the categories broad enough that it never felt like we were eating the same thing all the time.

Quite the contrary — because I knew we’d probably be having pork only one night, I could easily think back on the last two or three Tuesdays and remember that we’d had, for instance:

spiced tenderloin
pork chops in mushroom gravy
sausages

Time for pulled pork!

4. It Prompted More Inventive Use of Leftovers

It’s always nice to have some leftovers in the fridge to fall back on, but simply reheating the same meal bores me. (Why yes, I am a novelty-seeking person.)

The outline of our weekly meals encouraged me to look ahead and see how leftovers could fit in. Say we had roast chicken on Sunday, with plenty of meat left to pick off the bones. I could use it the next day for soup. I could save it for Wednesday and only have to make gravy and mash potatoes. I could toss it with fettuccini on Thursday.

Less prep, next-to-no planning, but more variety. You’re welcome.

5. It Reduced Waste

Because I had a general sense of what each dinner looked like ahead of time, I could forecast which groceries or leftovers we needed to use now and which ones we could easily use for a meal further along the week.

If Thursday rolled around and we still had stew from Monday night and sausages from Tuesday, I knew I should chop the sausages and toss it in the pasta, because Friday we’d be finishing the stew off. If there was still chicken in the fridge come Friday, I knew exactly how old it was and made sure it got eaten that day.

The days of pulling out a container of leftovers and trying to puzzle out when it was made or whether it was now a science experiment were left behind.

6. It Gave Structure to a Simple Recipe Book

After a month I actually got around to putting 3 to 4 of our favourite meals for each day into a small, hardcover notebook. I’d been thinking about putting one together for years, but wasn’t sure how to organize it.

Yup, you guessed it: it’s arranged by weekday.

Instead of feeling like I have to reinvent the wheel every week, I have something to fall back on. Some of these recipes are classics from my mother or grandmother. Others are odds and ends I collected over the years. A few favourites I salvaged from older cookbooks that are on the verge of falling apart and ready to be tossed.

I still look up new recipes all the time to try out. Those we really like (eventually) make it into the book. I don’t have scour several cookbooks to find that one recipe I want to try or vaguely half-remember.

Does it have potatoes? Then it’s probably in the Wednesday section.

Now, each day has a mix of easy recipes and a couple of “showstoppers” for when I’m feeling fancy. Putting the book together initially took less than an hour or two and it saves my sanity — and a lot of time — every week.

7. Closing Off Options is Liberating

Rereading what I’ve written so far makes me feel like Betty Crocker. Please believe me when I say: I love eating but I hate thinking about food. I would rather think about almost anything else. Right now I would rather be replaying the last thrilling scene from a novel I’m reading about lesbian necromancers in outer space. Doesn’t that sound more fun?

The best part about the food calendar is that I think about food prep for about three minutes every day instead of gazing into the abyss of unappeasable appetite. I can run the grocery store without a list and still do a quick mental check to make sure we have at least one option for each day. Soup? Check. Pork? Check.

My toddler is learning about choices. If you give her an open-ended question, say, “What do you want to eat?” you are not likely to get an answer. But if I ask, “Do you want apples or cucumbers?” She’ll pick one. Or she might say, “No, crackers!” But either way we can now move on with our lives.

I’m not sure our brains are built for infinite options. They’re much better at making small choices, even if the parameters are artificially created. Right or left? Thai or Sushi?

What kind of pasta should we have for dinner? is a far easier question to answer.

The calendar isn’t rigidly written-in-stone law, and we definitely substitute meals or swap days when it makes sense. But by having a prompt and foreclosing on options, I can make quicker decisions and move on to the things I really want to think about.

Maybe you start with Pizza night, like we did, and go from there. It’s certainly worth a try. At the very least it won’t be any worse than opening the fridge and looking straight through the chaotic contents to the yawning void beyond.