The Food Nanny helped me branch out and try new recipes like FISH TACOS.
Raise your hand if you are frustrated with your meal planning and preparation. Is everyone raising their hand? I know I am. Especially now that it’s hot outside, I don’t feel like making anything.
It is important to me that we eat most of our meals at home. The family gathered around the dinner table is an important memory from my childhood. We almost always ate dinner together. We rarely ever ate out.
Things seem to be different now. We eat out way more frequently than I would really like to. I always have the best intentions to make dinner at home, but it doesn’t always happen that way. I have found that having a menu and a shopping list and a plan make a huge difference.
The difficult thing is actually making the effort to plan. Sometimes the thought of making my weekly meal plan is so overwhelming that I just can’t do it.
Liz Edmunds, The Food Nanny, teaches a class on cooking from scratch at the Breathing Space Retreat in Daybreak.
Enter The Food Nanny. You may know her from her smash hit BYU-TV reality show where she enters someone’s home and helps them recover from bad eating/planning habits.
She hasn’t been to my house (yet), I was lucky enough to meet her at a recent conference I attended. She taught a class on cooking from scratch. I think the world around us has taught us that convenience cooking is the only option. The Food Nanny, Liz Edmunds is on a mission to right this wrong. She is a ball of energy and her passion for planning is very convincing.
I witnessed her make, in just a few minutes, the most delicious French Baguette. While she was preparing the dough, she disclosed many cooking secrets and gave those in attendance a formula for meal planning that I thought might even work for me.
The kids LOVED eating their first ever fish tacos.
She recommends that each night of the week has a theme, for example, Mondays are Mexican night, Tuesday are Fish/meatless nights, Wednesdays are Italian nights, and so on. The first thing you have to do is pick your theme nights based on what your family likes.
She inspired me to make FISH for the first time in my life. We ate Fish Tacos recently at our house and guess what…everyone LOVED them, even me.
With each night having a theme, I found it to be A LOT easier to decide what to make. Before the Food Nanny, I spent so much time hemming-and-hawing about what random recipe to make. The theme nights provide great guidance in meal selection and we eat a better variety of food.
This was my first time ever making FISH. I thought my house would stink forever, but with open windows it didn’t stink at all!
I am NOT being paid for this post, I’ve just found her and her system so helpful that I had to share.
She had a few copies of her cookbook and I was lucky enough to be able to purchase one. In it, she reveals her system for meal planning, shares her favorite recipes and gives tips on how to save a small fortune by simply cooking from scratch. I highly recommend it to anyone who struggles with what to make for dinner.
The Food Nanny was nice enough to agree to give away a copy of her book to one of The Vocal Sokol’s readers. If you’d like to be the recipient, leave me a comment and tell me about what meal planning is like at your house. Tell me what works and what doesn’t. While you’re at it, go ahead and like TheVocalSokol on Facebook.
The contest closes NEXT Thursday, June 27 so enter before then.
We are big Bountiful Basket fans. I plan our whole week based on what we get in our basket. I have lots of meats in my freezer (or meats I canned) and it is easy to throw together a meal with not much shopping.
Bountiful Baskets, yes! It’s that time of year again isn’t it! I love that we usually end up trying things we never would otherwise. Great idea!
i’m pretty bad at meal planning. i just buy what is on sale and improvise for the week
That’s what it usually comes down to for us too. I’m finding that when I leave it up to the Universe like that, the Universe usually ends up directing us to Little Caesar’s for the 6:30 dinner cop-out.
I love this post!! My thought exactly. I really love to cook, but with swimming lessons, softball, piano. and vacations summer is super crazy!! I have been feeling burned out. I love to eat yummy homemade food, but lately its freezer meals or eating out. I really want to feed my family healthy meals. Something that I always try to do regardless of what I prepared is always have fresh fruit or veggies with the meal. Its easy to cut up a cucumber or wash some berries. Thanks Kristin!
Thanks for your comment Jill! It’s so nice to hear from you! Great idea with the veggies or berries it’s easy to do that especially in summer.
Meal planning in my house is my husband calling me while I’m on the bus on my way home from work and asking me what is for dinner. To which I reply, “I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it”. I have good intentions, I would love to do better, my intentions just fly out the window when a new week starts and I haven’t done anything to plan for the night’s dinners. Which usually means we don’t eat until 7 every night. It would be wonderful to have a plan using someone elses expertise.
Meal planning is hard! I dread it. I never go to the grocery store without a list, but sitting down to plan for the week and make a list is awful! I love the idea of theme nights. Please, please, please pick me!!!! Ha ha. By the way, I love Alyssa’s “thumbs up” in the picture. So cute!!
How appropriate this post is for me. I’ve been in such a cooking rut lately. I used to be good at making a meal menu. I think life just got busy & I got out of the habit. I really need to do much better. I’ll have to check her out (or win her book!).
Meal planning at my house is which Fast Food restaurant to hit. I am not very good at cooking meals for my family. I have a meal planner on my wall. It just got replaces with a mail sorter because I haven’t been using it.
I’m so glad I’m not alone in the world. These theme nights really do make a huge difference.
I might come up with a few recipes a week. After that it is eat what you can find or throw something together and hope it tastes good. I think the themed night sounds amazing and I am kicking myself for not thinking about it myself!
Meal planning is a nightmare at our house. I work three part-time jobs plus volunteering at my church. I try to put something in the crockpot in the morning before I leave for work but often times I was am too tired the night before to do any planning so I’m just in a wild circle – no plans, no time, no prep…no dinner!
Help!!!
I meal plan but it seems to take me FOREVER! It’s an all-day event. Planning the menu, making a grocery list, shopping, and making dinner that night! I’m always so exhausted by the end of that day. Maybe I’d get some helpful tips on how to be more organized and decisive from this book!
I am usually not home for 4 out of 7 dinners and the ones I am home for I end up grabbing some chicken and a Pasta Roni type thing and can or frozen vegi something and there is about 90% of all of my meals…they are all lame! I have wondered what it would be like to have The Food Nanny come to our house. She might give up on us…
While I’m only cooking for one, meal planning is maybe harder because I have to think of multiple things that an item can be used for. it’s often easier to just not eat than go thru all the preperation.
I found if I don’t meal plan nothing gets made. I typed all our staples in a list organized by meat. I plan 12_14 meals and always atleast 3 new recipes. I love to hear ways to improve our new recipes. And the crock pot is my best friends in the summer
So if I don’t win the book can I borrow yours? It sounds like a great way to plan and really be prepared most of the time.
I would love to learn the Food Nanny’s way of meal planning! Whenever I’ve stuck to a meal plan in the past I find that was save time & money, and we eat better! I just need a jump start in motivation to start doing it again!
I used to plan out my meals for the month because it’s my least favorite thing to do. I feel like I’m in a rut now that it’s summer because I’d rather do anything but cook when it’s hot outside.