Friday, January 20, 2017

Meals and Planning..

I've given one planner over completely to meal-planning. Maybe it would would better within my 'bullet journal', but I feel like it would take up too much space, unnecessarily. I already have another planner with areas for each meal and a grocery list, a water counter, and the daily readings from Mass. It all fits together so well. 

We read the Mass readings aloud at breakfast, as the start to our school-day, our day is bookended in Scripture, my husband reads aloud at bed time as well. Right now, Isaiah precedes The Wizard of Oz.

Meal planning comes naturally to me, I love doing writing it all down and seeing the week
progress on paper. Living out my plans, is a constant struggle. I'm lazy or distracted, or else I forget entirely to go shopping and my plans are abandoned. But as we transition to a more intentional life, meal planning is essential. I want our meals to mean something, to be times of communion as a family. Acts of hospitality and love. I also need them to be healthy, sustaining, and frugal. All my intentions, existing together demand a primarily plant-based diet. A monastic table, rich in the living things we can grow, harvest, and grow again. 

I'm writing out the coming weeks meal-plans, and to keep track of how we're progressing towards our monastic table..I mark each meal with a notation to indicate vegan, vegetarian, or meaty. Only the meals on Sundays or feast days are meaty, and my goal is that out of the 21 meals in a week, 10 will be without animal products (excluding honey, which seems both penitential and hospitable). It's easier than expected, but writing out goals always is..living them is another thing entirely.

I would love to hear your mealtime goals, and what inspired them! Blessings.

1 comment:

  1. I thought I was caught up on your blogs! But I don't remember this ... maybe it's that my brain is sort of finally waking up to having time to think again, after three years of work and school combined ... I loved this, and your wardrobe and homeschooling thoughts too. (I will have to look up capsule wardrobes! That's a new concept for me.) I wrote a bunch of food goals and ideas down in my bullet journal at the beginning of the year, and so far am being pretty successful at making sure we have plenty of healthy snacks, which is apparently a necessity in pregnancy. I have to eat often in small portions, and honestly even when I'm not pregnant, I think I feel better when I structure food that way. But Lent might be a good time to streamline regular meals more and make sure those are more balanced and healthy, too.

    Not sure what gardening will look like this year, since bending over is a challenge right now! But I'm sure there will be some. :) My husband loves carrots, and I want to grow some, but last year only one lone carrot survived, out of several plantings, so I think I need to find a new seed source.

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