What are my options?

The first three months we were married the only meals we had more than once were tacos and waffles. Waffles we have ever Sunday, it’s tradition. Tacos we had maybe every other week back then. It was a lot of fun to try out a lot of different recipes.

Since then we’ve fallen into a rut. But it does help us know what day it is. If we’re eating this then it must be this day. We also have the problem that when I ask Brett what he wants for dinner he’ll say one of three things – chicken and rice, chicken and potatoes, or “What are my options?”

We’ve come up with two ways we’re working on that right now. We’ve already been using shared Google calendars so that we can keep track of what we are doing individually and what we are doing together. So we added a new shared calendar called “food” where we can plan out what we’re going to eat in advance. We are still having waffles every Sunday and tacos every Monday (Monday is very firmly tacos and Chuck night, we watch Chuck on DVD during the off season). Brett should probably dice our tomatoes from now on though. He’s a real good dicer, and I tried to slice off the tip of my finger dicing them this week.

We’ve also created a shared Google spreadsheet that lists all the things we’ve cooked, where we got the recipe (especially the specific cook book and page number), what the basic ingredients are, and eventually how we’d rate that meal. We’re slowly building it up, trying to remember what we ate during those first three months so we can list them again. If you have any recipes you love in your home, let me know what they are. We’ll give you credit in our spreadsheet.

So now we decide what we want long before dinner time. And when I ask Brett what he wants for dinner and he replies by asking what his options are, I can tell him to go look at the spreadsheet.

He’s been asking for tator tot casserole pretty much since we created our list. Unfortunately we’d just run out of tator tots right before then, something I’ve had to remind him of each week. We bought more this weekend and that’s what we’ll be having tomorrow. We do need to have potatoes some time soon too. We had one go bad (I hate the smell of rotten potatoes) so I pulled out the good ones and they are on the counter right now. We’ll either put a potato soup on our calendar or we’ll make some mashed potatoes to accompany other things. We both love mashed potatoes and since I’ve learned how to cook them in the pressure cooker (whole potatoes completely cooked in 12 minutes) they are even easier.