Menu Plan Monday: Planning to not plan?

Once again a good week - I pushed off Tuesday's meal, the steak and shrimp fajitas, until Wednesday and ended up getting pizza for our Tuesday dinner, which pushed everything else back, of course. So I didn't end up making Friday's planned meal of Strawberry and Basil salad with grilled cheese sandwiches.

Which I will try to make this week instead!

Sunday: Tamworth Pork chops with rice, green beans and corn. More about this one later.

Monday: Buttermilk fried chicken with corn spoon bread.

Tuesday: Let's try this again: Strawberry and Basil salad with grilled cheese (Tuesdays start before 5am for me, and I am not home until almost 7:30pm most times, so dinner needs to be prepped in advanced and take only minutes to finish, or I will pick up pizza on the way home.)

Wednesday: Fried ravioli. I know it isn't "balanced" but it is April Fool's Day, so why not?

Thursday: I think we will go out for subs here. I'll tell you why below.

Friday: Turkey burgers

While Tuesday is our normal busy night, Thursday comes in second. Normally I have an hour and a half between the kids getting off the school bus and our having to leave for music lessons. With planning and some advanced work, I can usually manage to have dinner ready when the kids get off the bus, or close to then, so that they do not eat a very large snack and then aren't ready to eat dinner before we leave for music. This week, however, it sounds like we might end up having a parent-teacher interview somewhere in that hour and a half time that I normally reserve for dinner, so the kids might not even make it home on the bus that night, and I know we will be pressed for time getting to music. Rather than stress about time, I am planning to not stress, planning to just take them out for sandwiches instead. Knowing what they will choose to eat (one will get tuna, cucumbers and pickles, with nothing else, not even cheese, on whole wheat, and the other will take ham and cheese, with lettuce and cucumbers, also on whole wheat,) and knowing that they will have eaten, takes some stress out of my evening. And the hubby and I can either join them or just have a little something later on, just the two of us.

Menu planning is very helpful, for organization, for budgeting and for stress-relief. But it stops being a stress-relief if it is too inflexible. By planning to not plan ahead for one evening, I've taken a load of stress off myself, and I've fixed it into my budget as well.

As usual, head on over to see all the other menu plans at Menu Plan Monday!