Home Smells Like Cooking: Weeks 1 & 2: Menus and Shopping Lists

The smell of cooking is what makes a house a home.

Cooking and baking make me happy.

They are my creative outlets and my favorite sensory indulgence. The smells of

breads baking,

meats roasting,

garlic and onions sizzling in olive oil on the stove...

any smell of cooking or baking filling my house, is what makes it feel like a real home to me.

So the one thing I want my kids to remember, is that no matter what, mom was never too busy to make homemade meals for them. It is my favorite way to show them

I love them

and how much they mean to me.

I gathered the recipes I will be blogging while I was in law school and put them into

40 weeks of menus

(Breakfast, dinner and dessert).

Many of the recipes are ones that caught my eye that I've never tried before. Others are family favorites or ones I've cooked before or eaten at a restaurant and really liked.

No dinner meal or dessert is repeated within the 40 weeks. (The breakfasts are repeated but not often).

Now that I am out of law school and into law practice, I want to make sure I still cook everyday for my family. It's so important for me.

So I am blogging my way through these menus, one after another. As I do so, I plan to tweak the recipes, and eliminate ones I don't like until I am happy with the whole set. Then I will print them for my kids to pass on for their use when they grow up and leave home.

I like to execute 2 weeks of menus at a time. Then I only have to grocery shop about twice a month. The menus are arranged so that we are eating a good variety of foods within a two week period, so that it doesn't feel like we are eating the same things all the time.

So I used a sort of basic pattern - especially for breakfasts.

Basically, Mondays tend to be a pancake, waffle or other breakfast bread.

Tuesdays are usually an egg dish,

Wednesdays a biscuit,

Thursdays a muffin,

Fridays are a grain (oatmeal or malt-o-meal) paired with a sweet roll.

Dinner patterns are less set.

But I try to do a soup or stew on Mondays with a salad.

The rest of the week the meals are just meant to be varied, so that the meats or proteins used and the dish's origin (Mexican, American, Italian, Asian, etc.) are not repetitive.

Desserts are a little more patterened,

with Monday usually being an ice cream dessert;

Tuesday usually being a cookie recipe;

Wednesday usually is a dessert involving a fruit;

Thursdays usually a bar-type dessert (browines, blondies, etc.);

Fridays often use gelatin or pudding in some way,

Saturdays often use a breakfast cereal,

and Sundays are usually some sort of special cake.

So here it goes, the following menus are posted up on our fridge. It's Saturday morning, so I am going grocery shopping to prepare to make these recipes. The shopping lists follow.

WEEK ONE MENU

WEEK TWO MENU

TIME TO SHOP!

Now that the menus for the next 2 weeks are chosen, it's time to do all the grocery shopping.

The great thing about doing 2 weeks at once, I only have to grocery shop twice a month. Then I can cook each day with the confidence that I have what I need to cook what I planned.

So the first thing I do is make a list of all the ingredients I will need to make each dish.

As I do this, I sort them into categories of what aisle / area of the grocery store they are found. This makes it easier at the grocery store to go through my list.

After the list is made, I go through my pantry and fridge to see what items I already have on hand and cross them off. So, for example, if I have a large bag of flour in my pantry, then I can cross it off my list.