Cleaning the Pantry Challenge

We are very fortunate to have a dear friend who comes to visit us every few months from Sydney.  Each time he stays with us, he cooks a beautiful meal for us (and I make a dessert).  Tomorrow he will be here again, and will be cooking Osso Bucco with Gremolata, served with mashed potatoes.  Yum!

Anyway, yesterday I decided that I would have to allocate some time today to clean my pantry, as I would be too embarrassed for our friend to see the terrible state it was in.  Always the procrastinator, I sat down to the computer this morning instead of getting straight into the task at hand and had a good laugh when I saw Rhonda Jean's post today on her Down To Earth blog, where she set a Cleaning the Pantry Challenge!

Nothing cures me of procrastination better than a good challenge, so I got to work straight away.

Here is the embarrassing before shot of my pantry:

An hour or so later, it now looks like this:

What a transformation!  I'm just amazed at how much space I have in there now.  I didn't have to throw much out, so the space is created by taking the food out of it's packaging and putting it in stackable containers.  I now even have space to put my food processor away so it's no longer taking up space on the kitchen bench, so I am very happy about that!

So, challenge completed!  I encourage you all to clean out your pantry this weekend as well, it really is a worthwhile exercise :-)

Menu Planning Tips

After extolling the virtues of menu planning in my earlier post today, I thought it would be good to share some of my tips for designing a weekly menu plan.

We are a family who don't eat a lot of meat. My kids don't really like it that much and I have found that a predominantly vegetarian diet lends itself to greater variety (and is also a lot cheaper, especially when you grow your own vegetables). To ensure we incorporate a range of food in our diet, I use the following guidelines:

• No more than 2 meals with meat (can be any combination of either fish, chicken or red meat)
• No more than 1 pasta meal
• 1-2 rice meals (e.g. risotto, fried rice, side dish, etc.)
• At least 1 meal with pulses or legumes (e.g. lentils, chickpeas, etc.)
• No more than 1 egg-based meal (e.g. frittata, omelette, quiche, etc.)
• No more than 1 bread-based meal (e.g. burger, pizza, burritos, side dish, etc.)
• No more than 1 pastry meal (e.g. pies, quiches, etc.)

Of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive - for example, a quiche would qualify as both a pastry and egg-based meal, a beef curry served with rice would count towards both the meat and rice meals. I'm not absolutely strict, it really is just meant as a guide.

I have found that by following these guidelines, I am also able to introduce my kids to a wide range of foods. Even at 3 and 4 years of age, they understand that if they choose to be fussy, they will go hungry! It also keeps it more interesting for me, as without these guidelines, I'd probably resort to the easy option of making most of my meals with pasta and/or minced meat!

Menu Plan Monday

I am a recent convert to menu planning. Last year, I found these gorgeous lists and decided that I had to try menu planning just so I could use them.

As much as I love, love, love that list design, I abandoned it after about three weeks largely because:

1. It was taking me too long to update it (just had to use my best writing on such a pretty list)
2. My husband does most of the supermarket shopping, so I needed to send him off with another list that didn't look so girly
3. There's not much space for additional grocery items required (e.g. nappies, soap, etc.) , so again I needed to create another separate shopping list
4. Although it's a great list to keep on the fridge door, somehow I misplaced all of my older lists, so I didn't end up with a collection of menu plans as anticipated

So that was the end of my menu planning for a while. Then, in one week earlier this year, I heard three fellow mums independently discussing their difficulties with planning what to have for dinner. One mum said, "I would like to just have someone just tell me what to cook for dinner and I'll cook it". It dawned on me that for most of us mums, it is the process of deciding what to cook our families for dinner that is the bigger chore, not the process of actually cooking the meals. I decided to have a look around the blogs and see what ideas I could find to make menu planning easier.

This is when I stumbled upon orgjunkie's Menu Plan Monday. Every Monday (well, it's actually Tuesday for those of us in Oceania), Laura invites readers to submit their own menu plans for the week. There are hundreds of menu plans submitted each week, some have recipe links and photos so it can be a great source of ideas.

It is now two months since I submitted my first Menu Plan Monday. I can honestly say that it has made my life simpler - here's why:

• Having a weekly deadline is a great incentive for me to actually sit down and create a menu plan. Instead of telling myself, "I'm too busy/can't be bothered this week", I say "My (albeit imaginary) readers need my meal ideas this week and I must have it done by Monday".
• Where a recipe comes from an online source, I include a link to the recipe with my menu plan. This makes it easier to find the recipe, and also helps when it comes to preparing shopping lists.
• The more menu plans I create, the bigger the 'library' of plans I have available to me. This really helps speed up the process. I have noticed how much easier it is already, after only 2 months of planning. If I'm having a particularly difficult week, I can easily just replicate one of my previous plans (I did this just last week). I can also pick and choose individual recipes from past menu plans if I don't feel inclined to try something new.
• I no longer experience that terrible feeling at around 4pm, when the kids are home from school and everyone is tired and hungry, having to decide what to make for dinner.
  
• I am able to ensure that my family has a healthy, balanced diet. When I prepare a menu plan, I make sure that I have our basic nutritional needs covered. We very rarely resort to fast food, as I always have the ingredients at home to make a quick and healthy meal. My menu planning tips can be found here.
  
• If something unexpected happens during the week, having a menu plan and ingredients ready to go not only means that there is one less thing to worry about, it also ensures that the family has a healthy meal at a time when it is especially important to do so.
• Menu planning significantly reduces waste and grocery bills because you only buy what you need.

So after all of that, here is what will be on our dinner table this week:

Monday: Mushroom Soup
Tuesday: Cottage Pie
Wednesday: Pumpkin Risotto
Thursday: Tofu Pastries
Friday: Chickpea Curry
Saturday: Spinach & Sweet Potato Canneloni
Sunday: Barramundi Curry with Beans

Click here to see the other menu plan links this week on orgjunkie.com.

Chore Sticks

As you can no doubt imagine, with four children aged between 3 and 7, our house is almost always incredibly messy. I needed a way to motivate my team of potential little helpers. Having had limited success with threats and/or bribery, I was excited to stumble upon the idea of chore sticks in a playgoup magazine. The basic idea of chore sticks is to write a set of jobs that you want the kids to do on separate popsicle sticks (I started out using strips of cardboard, but they weren't durable or identical - I'm sure my eldest had figured out which stick was which and could therefore choose her job of preference, not that she would admit to it!). The kids then pick a stick at random and are then responsible for completing the chore written on the stick.

As my kids are close in age (in fact, only 19 months separates the three youngest ones), I decided it would be easiest to select jobs that they are all capable of doing. I thought of creating a separate set of slightly more difficult jobs for my eldest, but decided against this in the interest of simplicity and enhancing the kids' sense of solidarity. At first I had just four chore sticks, which worked well for a while before the kids started getting bored with them. I then realised I need to increase the number of chores to keep it interesting. I added some silly ones as well, to keep it fun. To help the kids that can't read, I drew a little picture at the top of the stick to help them identify the chore.


Here are some of the chores that we have on our sticks:

• Vacuum floor
  
• Feed Bunny
• Check Spot's water and food - sadly, this chore is no longer required :(
• Clean table and sweep the floor
• Make beds & put pyjamas away (morning only job)
  
• Put toys and books away

And some of the silly ones:

• Give Mummy a cuddle (this is my favourite, of course)
• Tickle the person closest to you
• Put nappies in the bin
  
• Roar like a tiger

Every day after breakfast, and again after dinner, I select eight chore sticks according to what jobs really need doing at the time (four real jobs, and four silly ones). The kids then select a stick and complete that chore before selecting their second stick and doing that chore. We usually put some music on while we are tidying up, which makes it a bit more fun.

The chore sticks have had a big thumbs up from me, as well as from my team of little helpers. Just the mere mention of chore sticks gets them excited and sometimes they even ask to do them! My only challenge is to keep thinking of new jobs, as the kids do get bored with the same chores pretty quickly.

Menu Plan Monday

One of my 2010 resolutions is to become more organised. As a mum of four little ones, I'm often told, "I don't know how you do it". To be honest, I don't know how I do it either sometimes, but something I have learned is that being organised makes a big difference! Whilst my basic organisation skills are not bad, I know there is a lot of room for improvement. My entire house needs a complete overhaul, which is going to take a lot of time, so I have decided to focus on one area at a time.

The first area I have decided to focus on is my kitchen. My kitchen always looked dirty, even when there were no dirty dishes on the bench. Last week I realised that the reason it always looked dirty was because I had permanent "stuff" on the benchtop (e.g. fruit bowl, coffee jar, plastic drink bottles and containers that I'd been too lazy to put away, etc) and windowsill (e.g. paint brushes, empty vases, etc). So last week I removed all of the clutter, and am exercising a more disciplined attitude towards keeping it clean. This is just the first step, and even though it is a small one, it has already made a big difference to my state of mind. I don't feel embarrassed when I walk into the kitchen anymore!

The next step in my kitchen overhaul is menu planning. There are 3 main reasons why I want to plan a weekly menu:

1. Our family does not eat a lot of meat, so I am always mindful of cooking meals using variety of ingredients in order to meet our nutritional needs.
2. I want to reduce wastage and eliminate the need to go to the supermarket every day or two by purchasing only what we need for the week.
3. I find having to decide on what to cook for dinner every day quite stressful and end up cooking the same things every week (I guess you could say I'm in a mealtime rut!)

For these reasons, I have decided to join Laura at orgjunkie.com's Menu Plan Mondays.

So here is my first menu plan:
Monday: Salmon sushi rolls
Tuesday: Spinach and sweet potato cannelloni
Wednesday: Healthy meatloaf
Thursday: Vegetable frittata
Friday: Chicken Tikka Masala (will just use a ready-made sauce for this and serve with some Jasmine rice)
Saturday: To be decided - my husband's turn to cook!
Sunday: Corn, bacon & zucchini soup

So now I have officially committed to menu planning! Next step in my kitchen overhaul - tidying up the cupboards and drawers...arghhh!

I would love to hear any tips from any of those of you out there who have done something similar.