Momhood Captured | Parenting, Reviews, & Giveaways!

The following article comes courtesy of awesome guest blogger Jen, of Jayesel! I’ve known Jen online for what seems like a REALLY LONG TIME, and among her other talents, she is everything that I wish I was when it comes to being organized and just generally with-it. I mean, she was even able to knock out this amazingly useful and informative post whilst being extraordinarily pregnant! Big thanks to Jen, and be sure to check out her wonderful blog!

When my husband and I got married, I had never really cooked before. Unless you count microwavable pizza rolls in my college dorm, or microwavable Easy Mac, or Ramen noodles made in the microwave.

I was VERY good at using a microwave.

But, now that I had a husband and an apartment, it was time to be a Grown Up. We had a (small, yet fully functional) kitchen! With a stove! And an oven! It was time to learn how to cook.

I started simple with some pastas and stir fry and tacos. Then I got recipes from my mom for all the things I loved growing up- tuna casserole, real macaroni and cheese. I also had a brief but frustrating relationship with a crock pot (turns out, that particular crock pot was terrible so it wasn’t that I couldn’t cook. I am now BFFs with my crock pot!) I tried to cook a few nights a week, and we used leftovers for lunches or Lazy Leftover Nights. I’m sure I made some icky meals now and then, but it was a learning process. Eventually I got the hang of things and even got more adventurous with trying new recipes I’d find online or in magazines.

Fast forward about 6 years and we had a baby. Suddenly my routine of cooking semi-regularly went out the window. One of the biggest problems I had with cooking dinner was planning ahead. With an infant to feed and wipe and burp and take care of each day, I would look up at the clock and suddenly it was 4pm, I hadn’t showered, and there was nothing on the menu for dinner. Nothing in the fridge thawing. CRAP. We ate a lot of soup and drive-thru fast food. And really, that wasn’t helping with my post-baby weight loss.

The ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ method of cooking just wasn’t working for our lifestyle anymore. I needed to get organized.

I needed a plan.The first thing I did was get rid of the messy recipe box I had been using. It was hard to keep organized and some of the recipes I had clipped from magazines were really tiny or really huge and everything got lost in a sea of paper. And I would just plain forget about some of our favorite dinners that I didn’t actually have a printed-out recipe for- like spaghetti, for example. So I got a binder instead.

I cleaned house on all the recipes I had collected, only keeping the ones we had tried and loved or ones I honestly thought I could make and enjoy. I reorganized them all into categories: instead of ‘chicken’ or ‘beef’ or ‘soups’ like on the pre-printed cards of my recipe box, I made my own: ‘Dinner’, ‘Appetizers’, ‘Side Dishes’, ‘Baked Goods’, etc. More topic/meal-based, rather than ingredient-based. It just made more sense for me to organize them that way. If I’m looking for something to take to a party: APPETIZERSECTION! If I’m looking for a side dish to go with chicken: SIDE DISH SECTION! When I’m looking for dinner ideas: DINNER SECTION!

Then- and here’s the somewhat insane, maybe a little bit anal-retentive part- I typed up each and every recipe on my computer and printed them out on 4×6 index cards. And I put those index cards into sleeves that fit into the 3-ring binder. With dividers and everything. There are also pockets in the front and back for new recipes I haven’t tried yet. Once I make something new that we love and want to have again, I’ll type it up, print it out, and stick it in the right category. Ta-da!

Like I said: a little anal-retentive. But ORGANIZED! I know it sounds nuts, but once I got the first batch of recipes typed up and in the binder, it hasn’t been hard to keep up with at all. My husband may have given me a few weird looks during the process. But whatever. He loves me anyway!

I’ve been using this binder for several years now and it has worked great. Before my weekly grocery shopping trip, I make a list of meals for the week, leaving a few days ‘open’ for leftovers or orderingpizza or even going out to dinner as a family. Then I make my shopping list based on those meals. I’ll consult the sales for our local grocery store, along with what’s in the fridge or pantry already to see if I can come up with something to save some money (because I SUCK at using coupons, so sales are my best bet for deals.)

There is flexibility here, of course. I’ll sometimes switch things around depending on what I’m in the mood for on a particular day or if something comes up one day and we won’t be home one night, etc. But at least I know that I have 4 or 5 meals for the week, all the ingredients bought and ready to go. It has saved me tons of stress over the last minute What’s For Dinner? question. And it has also made us eat healthier- no more panicked calls to my husband at 5pm, asking him to pick up some greasy fast food on his way home from work (though, occasionally, I’ll let that happen. Because: YUM.) Once I gotorganized and started planning meals ahead of time, I was able to lose those last 20 pounds of pregnancy weight. Hooray for that!

So there you go! That’s my system. Yours doesn’t have to be quite as crazy as mine. You could be less insane than me and just put clipped-from-magazine-recipes in the binder if you wanted to, instead of going nuts and typing and printing them all. Or, you could skip the binder altogether if you already have a great recipe box or cookbook you love to use. I think the biggest thing is just having some simple, yummy dinners available in your recipe library and planning ahead a little bit.

So… what’s for dinner tonight? :)