Feeding the masses

All this planning and cooking is stressing me out.  I remember a time when I actually enjoyed both of these activities so I'm not sure why it seems to be such a chore this days.  Oh, yes I do, because no matter how well planned or prepared the meal is, there will undoubtedly be someone...or several someones, who would rather have pizza or chicken nuggets.  So then I end up waffling back and forth between the whether it is better to just feed the people what they will eat or try to spend the extra time and energy trying to prepare a healthy meal and then guilt convince them to eat it.  And THIS is what is so frustrating about our food situation.  Certainly there are worse problems to have...at least we have the option of serving our family healthy foods.  I fully acknowledge that there are many people out there who do not.

I guess the questions remains...how can I simplify this process in my home.  One idea is to scale back the preparation and serve foods in their freshest forms (less time cooking and planning).  Make every meal a potluck of mostly fresh foods, including selections of foods that I know my family will eat.   I'm going to think on this and try it for a day or two and see if I can flesh out this idea a bit.

March already?

February was kind of  a miserable failure.  The focus was on health, and simplifying health is a bit of an abstract concept.  I did come to a realization that the demands on my time are probably keeping me from really being healthy until something big changes.  For that reason we put our house on the market...and sold it!  We had an offer within about 4 hours of it being on the market, so now we are looking for where we will go from here.  If it has done anything, it has certainly made life a bit more complicated (especially as we got it ready to show), but the hope is that a little over complication in the present will more for more simplification in the future.

And on to the next month.  The focus for March is food.  This one I've been looking forward to since the beginning of the year.  I've got lots of good ideas for simplifying our food buying and cooking, but haven't had the time (or much motivation) to really focus on implementing and sustaining the good ideas.  I'm hoping that the focus on food for March will give me a good reason to get it to the forefront.

Here's my punch list for March:

• Pack lunches the night before (this will ensure that we are eating better, reduce the morning stress, and help me not feel like I'm neglecting my kids while I'm getting ready for work and hoping that they are packing something halfway healthy.  I don't know why I don't already do this....oh yes, I do.  I'm lazy :)
• Trust the menu plan.  I have subscribed to a number of menu plans (savingdinner.com's menu mailer, emeals.com, etc) over the years and have also used allrecipes.com menu planner for the last couple of years.  I love both of these options and find that they both work if I will just stick with them.  The plan not only keeps me on track with the foods we do need, it helps keep me from wandering down the wrong aisles and picking up all kinds of things that we don't need (i.e. twinkies, m&ms and laffy taffy...all of which have found residence in our kitchen at the moment).
• Spend 2 hours on Saturday prepping food for the week.  This always makes the week go better.  I usually bag up fruits and veggies and will occasionally freeze some smoothie blends for the mornings.  When we have things on hand and ready to go, we eat well.  When we don't, well, we resort to twinkies and m&ms.  

I think that's it for this month.  I'm going to add reminders to my phone for the first and last items so that maybe I'll be more consistent.