We will have lived in the Gingerbread House for a year come the end of January. I've been reflecting on what I have learned in the first year and what I want to achieve in the second.
1. Bread making
I tend to do the same multigrain loaf with a
few small variations and I make bread irregularly. Too often, I look
in the bread box at breakfast time and realise I should have made a loaf
the night before.
This year: Make a smaller loaf each day that can be used for breakfast and lunchbox sandwiches. (Alannah starts preschool in February!)
2. Menu planning
I have worked out a system of menu planning
that works for me: Pasta Mondays, Slow Cooker Curry Tuesdays, Meat & 3 Veg Wednesdays, Stirfry Thursdays, Vege (or Fish) Fridays, Oven Bake Saturdays, and Chef's Choice Sundays.
I have also worked out
a system of deliveries that works for me. I get meat delivered by
Brookvale Meats (fortnightly on average), milk
and cheese delivered by Aussie Farmers (each week), and fruit and
vegetables delivered from Sydney Fresh (fortnightly on average) and
picked from our kitchen garden.
This year: Get
better at
co-ordinating the menu planning with the deliveries and garden by doing
menu plans a fortnight in advance and placing or tweaking orders to
suit.
3. Recipes
I have photocopied recipes from my collection of
cook books (Bill, Jamie, Annabel, various Womens Weekly publications),
printed out (and pinned) recipes from the blogosphere, and organised
them all into a folder that makes menu planning a lot easier. It may
always be a work in progress but the bones are there.
This year: Make
a Gingerbread Kitchen Favourites cook book. Not my own recipes,
goodness no. I'm thinking perhaps five recipes for each day of the
week, perhaps some lunchbox favourites, even a preserving recipe or
two. Not only would it be great to know all those recipes by the time I
return to work (or at least by the time I'm back at work more than I'm
at home), but it could also be something I give to the girls later in
life.
3 comments:
You could var the breads in a similar way to which you vary the menus, perhaps less dramatically. Remember, at the beginning, when you made a different loaf each time until you worked out which was the more popular? A multigrain, a wholemeal, a sourdough, a banana bread, a raisin loaf ... you know better than I what is available. More multigrain than anything else, but not ONLY multigrain.
I had that in the original draft actually. But I whittled it down to three things for the list. Not biting off more than I can chew, as they say. Definitely plan to vary it a bit and hope to vary it a lot.
I wonder if I could formulate some overarching plans for the garden during 2014? I tend to fly by the seat of my pants. Shall cogitate.
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