Ready to restart the school year, activities and all that means for dinnertime in your house? Perhaps you made a resolution to become more successful at dinnertime? Make more meals and eat less take-out this school year? Organizing Dinner is dedicating this entire month’s blogs to providing you solid solutions and delicious recipes for weeknight cooking success.
This post is going to cover Organizing Dinner’s Smart Ingredients way to plan your meals. As you may recall us saying in the past, it does not take a “plan” as in any sort of written-out schedule. Why this doesn’t work: there is little flexibility. You need to be able to make what you have a taste and time for on a certain night… and on a moment’s notice. Our plan is also more like a lifetime plan than one week-at-a-time plan… which can fly by and leave you, again, without a plan.
Here’s how to start your Smart Ingredients plan:
Define your family’s three “go to meals”. For this week, buy the ingredients you need for these three meals in bulk. This is not confining you to a year of eating these three meals over and over. Rather, this is a groundwork. In addition, the “Smart” shopping style of buying in bulk is not one where you are spending an excess amount of money, and buying more than you can store at home. Rather, you are buying just the Smart ingredients that add up to dinner in your house. Eliminate the “random” ingredients you may buy as an “Oh, I might use this someday”, and for this week, just focus on success.
With this first step, the pressure of wondering what’s for dinner is over…. gone from your year. Next we’ll show you how to expand the variety of your meals. 
To give you an example, any night of the year my family would eat pizza, pasta or tacos. Therefore I always keep on hand the following ingredients: tomato sauce or ingredients to make it, tortillas, ground beef, chicken, and yeast and flour to make homemade pizza dough. Yeast, pasta and flour are easy to buy in large quantity and ground beef, chicken and tortillas can be frozen. On my weekly shopping trip, I always grab cheese that can be used for my tacos, pizza and pasta dishes, and some of my family’s favorite vegetables, such as peppers, spinach and onions.
Now, looking at the ingredients mentioned above, consider what can be made for dinner. I can make traditional pasta with noodles and red sauce, OR I could use some of the chicken and whatever vegetables I have on hand to make a chicken pasta with a cheese sauce. I could make a traditional cheese or vegetable pizza OR I could make a taco pizza. I could make ground beef tacos OR I could make chicken tacos or fajitas. You see by learning to mix and match Smart ingredients, I have expanded a simple 3 “go to” weeknight dinners to 6 without having to buy any more ingredients.
There is so much information out there in the grocery world. Hundreds upon thousands of ingredients we are told by advertising and pretty packaging will make our dinners successful. To win the game, you need to be in charge of what you’re buying. Casting a net on hundred of random items at the grocery store doesn’t always add up to dinner at home. Shopping Smart does.
This shopping plan is a mini excerpt of the 70 Meals, One Trip to the Store cookbook. Click here for the Chicken Fajitas recipe from 70 Meals, One Trip to the Store.
