The Truth About Menu Plans: Part II

Having just pulled eighteen rubbery-no, downright gummy- muffins out of the oven, I feel a temporarily reluctance to write about cooking and my own "blithe" kitchen. The only blithe thing about this kitchen right now is my son, cheerfully eating the rubbery muffins and hopefully getting some nutrition out of all the expensive ingredients I so innocently threw in the batter. Was it the sweet potato? The extra carrot? The simple fact that I was experimenting and knew better?

In any case, my recipe for these muffins will be a few trial runs down the road. And recognize that any jaded comments below are a symptom, as any cook knows, of a recent failure.

But this post is about my menu-plan of last week, and in particular, about how well the plan worked. Did we actually eat the meals? Will any of the dishes make a future appearance at our dinner table? Were the menus too complicated, expensive, or impractical? The verdict is now officially in.

A May Menu
(Inordinately Influenced by Jamie Oliver)

Picadillo
Brown Rice and Tortillas (actually, sourdough biscuits)
Carrots Boiled with Orange, Garlic and Herbs
We ate this meal. We liked it. But it was a bit more complicated than I like, what with juggling all the ingredients for the picadillo and the carrots.

Jacket Potatoes with Smoked Salmon and Sour Cream
Simple Salad
We ate this meal. We liked it very much.

Roasted Pork Tenderloin
Roasted Rosemary Potatoes
Simple Salad and Pain Ordinaire
This meal is the puzzler. What should have been glorious was not. I could not get the tenderloin to cook properly, the potatoes were disappointing (sorry Jamie), and I spoiled the salad with too much vinegar. It was an excellent lesson that the simplest dishes are often the hardest to cook well.

Grilled Zucchini, Onion, Pesto and Mozzarella Sandwiches
Easy, fast, and messy. Also, somewhat boring.

Orangette's Green Lentil Coconut Soup
Bread
This dinner did not even make past the grocery shopping trip. Instead, we ate, as predicted, Annie's mac-n-cheese, peas, and a hoppy IPA. Delicious.

So there you have it. I did, in fact, learn a few things from this little exercise.

The first is that it would serve me well to take notes. I hate to take notes. But too many instances of forgetting what went wrong or what went well are making me reconsider my laziness. (The muffins are an unfortunate reminder). On a related note, I also realized that I should actually try to perfect some recipes and master some basics, rather than trying four new recipes a week. And the final lesson learned? That menu plans do indeed work for me. So I am going to keep making them, week after week, mistake after mistake, permutations notwithstanding.