CTW2

For the record, I did complete all tasks for Week 1. Here's Week 2.

Heart
Rummage through your brains (or your recipe books) for a dish you used to make "all the time" but have neglected in recent months (or years). Acquire the ingredients and make it! And photograph it (we like to see proof around here*). While you're at it, you might as well share the recipe. And tell us what the dish means to you. In fact... dish.

Here, off the top of my head:

Dishes inherited from childhood:

• Chicken Curry - I snagged this recipe the last time I was home, and shortly afterward found a copy of the cookbook it's from at a library sale.
  
• Spaghetti carbonara - recipe acquired in Italy. Actually made this for New Years.
  

Later:

• Moroccan Chicken - I most recently made this for relatives in North Carolina. They thought cooked olives would be weird, but liked it.
  
• Vegetable curry - from the 1997 Joy of Cooking
  
• Cottage Cheese Pancakes - Same.
  
• Onion Cheddar Bread with thyme - This was my housewarming and hostess gift. It tastes a lot less like stuffing than you'd think. I don't particularly like stuffing.
  
• Quiche - I like eggs. A lot.
  
• "The Pork Tenderloin" - this is an amazing recipe received from a colleague at my first job who was from St. Louis; originally published in their paper of record (the Post-Something?)
• Foolish Beans - named because the recipe was posted on the message boards of The Motley Fool. Don't ask.
  
• Refried beans - actually, I haven't entirely left off making these, but I include them because I class them chronologically with all of the above. Much healthier than you think.
  

The telling thing is that all of the dishes listed under "later" came into my life in the same era, namely 2002-2005. 2005 was when life (in the form of a weirdly stressful job situation, suddenly-much-longer commute and effective workday, and multiple simultaneous medical issues) finally broke my systems. The systems for shopping and cooking and eating and exercising and cleaning and doing laundry and bookkeeping and bill paying and whatever else functional people routinely do. Try as I might, I've never gotten fully un-derailed in that respect, even with the fresh start of moving half way across the country.

At any rate, when I look at that list above, I see an era with a very clean break at the end of it.

Breath & Bones

• To summarize: deal with dietary supplements and superfluous guidance documents.
  

All set.

Head
Find a good source to help you with whatever element of menu planning is important to you, whether it's nutrition, diet, the actual planning process, or something else. Your goal this week is not to execute the perfect weekly menu but to get your head in the game and lay the groundwork. If you have all the research and theory you need (or can stand), it's time to think about how to make using it the path of least resistance.

My issue, for now, is that "actual planning process," as discussed by zooza and scb. That part seems key to re-forming the general necessary habits that need to be in place before it makes sense to try to address the other issues. The problem, of course, is related to what I wrote under "Heart" above.

There's plenty of stuff out there about menu planning, of course, but as I commented at zooza's, a lot of it's overkill for me. Getting 21 meals on the table weekly for a family of four is a very different task than feeding one adult with an inconsistent appetite and a high capacity to tolerate redundancy. My lot is unquestionably the simpler one, but without adequate forethought or a controlling system, neither case is likely to yield satisfying results.

I've broken down the problem into several sub-issues, most of which will look inane at first glance:

• How to eat breakfast.
• How to eat lunch.
• How to eat dinner.
• What's the Toast alternative?
• You do snack, you know.
  

Put more clearly (and certainly more pretentiously), "How to eat breakfast" really means, "Identify the controlling philosophy and/or technique to be applied to meeting breakfast requirements." At this point, what matters is having an answer. So:

• How to eat breakfast. Do I stockpile bagels in my desk drawer, or is cold cereal the answer? Is their room in my life for oatmeal or cold pizza?
  
  
• How to eat lunch. Sandwiches? Salads? Leftovers? Where do they come from? Which one is most likely to happen?
  
  
• How to eat dinner. How often does a medium-sized and not-easily-bored individual actually need to cook to keep meal supply roughly equal to meal demand?
  
  
• What's the Toast alternative? Stir fried vegetables? Plate of pasta? Lean Cuisine? Realistically, we all probably need several of these - the grown up equivalent of the batch of fish sticks mom throws at the kids when there's only 20 minutes between piano lessons and soccer practice. But they need to be pre-defined in order to be effortless. In my case, this would also answer the question, "What to eat on Thursday when the week's dinners are used up."
  
  
• You do snack, you know. Well, sometimes I do. It depends on stuff. But good planning is the only way to make sure snacks remain, say, carrots and hummus, rather than Toast, or even toast.

So, where does that leave me?

With a lot of random thoughts like, "I really like sandwiches, so I should buy better bread," and, "What's a cost-effective source of mixed salad greens?"

And with a very skeleton plan along the following lines:

• Find Something That Works For Now to cover breakfast and lunch. Minor level of effort.
• Reacquaint myself with the dishes under "Heart," in the interest of getting back in the habit.
• Experiment after that.

That probably doesn't sound like as much progress as it actually is.