Dinner is the most important family time we have every day, but often we go into it harried and exhausted, hectically getting food on the table with no energy left. In this 38-minute workshop, Allison Schaaf and Mystie Winckler give several suggestions for simple changes to make to your meal routines to eliminate decision fatigue…
It’s easy to slip into feeling like dinner is a drag, like it’s an interruption, like it’s something we just really rather not do. But since we do need to serve dinner everyday, why not learn how to enjoy cooking more? It truly is possible! Of course, there are times where it just doesn’t happen…
I had a dream. And in this dream my pantry always had everything I needed. I never ran out of ingredients to make dinner. I would go to the pantry, pull out what I needed to make dinner that day and it’d be there—no surprises. I had achieved well-stocked pantry perfection. But it turns out…
Getting dinner on the table faster and with less effort – that’s the dream, right? We want easy family dinners because dinner is something we need to do every day, one way or another. When it feels like we spend half the day dealing with food, it’s easy to think we must be doing something…
Take your kids with you to the grocery store. Yes, really, especially when they’re 10-and-under. I totally understand why most people opt to do their grocery shopping in the evening or on weekends, when they can go alone. Sometimes I do, too. But I try not to make that my normal routine, because I think…
Lunch is the mid-day reset. No plan survives contact with the enemy. -Helmuth van Moltke The perfect plan- set out in the morning, in the early hours before the house wakes up and the day rolls away from the station- never unfolds quite as I’d hoped. The lessons aren’t finished as early as I’d have…
Ah, margin. The two red lines gently guiding you to give more breathing room to your paper. I can see those lines so clearly when it comes to paper and pen- but when it comes to my time, it’s just so easy to fill my page to overflowing. In fact, I rarely consider margin at…
Google Calendar is a great online tool. Of course there is the obvious use for calendars, but you can also set up calendars to use as journals, menu plans, blog planning, birthday reminders, and even school calendars or schedules. I like to set up each of these as separate calendars so that they show up…
As the end of the school semester drew near, the holidays drew near, the end of the year drew near, I stopped menu planning. I just never took the time to sit down and write out meals – there were always other things I thought I should be doing. We still ate just fine –…
It happens all too often: it’s 4pm and I don’t know what’s for dinner. Now, having my pantry stocked correctly and my plan possibilities already lined out (in Simplified Dinners) does help tremendously in these situations. Actually, it enables me to have such situations, because I know I have meal-makings on hand that I can…