A Menu of Menus

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get home so tired I can barely put one foot in front of the other. Thinking up a decent meal can be almost too much to face. I don’t want to rely on ready made food, though, which is often loaded with salt, fat, and bizarre ingredients of suspicious origin (what, exactly, is ‘modified food starch’ anyway?)

My husband and I came up with a simple solution that doesn’t involve a lot of elaborate meal planning, a major time investment, or ninja-level cooking skills.

Here’s the trick: We put our heads together and came up with a half-dozen easy meals that could be prepared from the basic ingredients we buy every week, and posted them on the fridge.

Our list this month reads:  salad every night

• pesto & noodles
• omelets and toast
• spaghetti & sauce
• rice pilaf
• baguette and assorted cheeses
• french toast

If by some freak of luck, one of us has a little extra energy, we make something more elaborate or demanding, but on those nights we come home exhausted, we just pick something off the list, make it and a salad, and know that we haven’t let ourselves or our bodies down.