Simple Eating.featured

We are embarking on a new minimalism journey: family meals. Our goals are to eat at home when we’re not traveling, make meal preparation simple and enjoyable, and make dinner a significant part of our family life. I grew up in a southern family, where meals are central to forming and maintaining relationships, and it’s something I would love to carry forward.

I’ve realized over the past couple of days that despite feeling like our simplifying has been at best sporadic and at worst chaotic, I have in fact developed a system over the last year and a half. Since meals are an area where we have generally been unsuccessful, I decided to implement the same principles and plans that have allowed us to simplify many other areas of our lives. And share about the process here.

• Identify the problem. The motivation to simplify an area of our lives always comes from frustration with our current set up. In this instance, we eat out far too often, and I am quickly overwhelmed and discouraged by meal planning and preparation. Since we travel frequently and don’t plan well, we waste a lot of food. This deeply bothers me, especially knowing the example it sets for our daughters as they watch us empty the fridge before a trip.
• Assess the current system. I looked at what we’re doing now that isn’t working for us. After several attempts over the years, we’ve come to the conclusion that we are not good with freezer meals. We are also not good at finishing leftovers. So buying in bulk or having one large prep day a week aren’t the best approaches for us.
• Eliminate clutter. I  stood back and looked at our physical set up to see what we could clear to make life easier. I decided to mostly empty the freezer since we hardly ever plan far enough in advance to prepare food from frozen. I also significantly cut down on the amount of food storage we have in the pantry. Since we struggle with meal planning, having a hodge podge of ingredients without a specific purpose is far from inspiring. I kept a few items in both places that we replace at least monthly. The rest we took to the food pantry or incorporated into this week’s meal plan.
• Establish the goal. I began to think of occasions when making dinner is genuinely enjoyable. I love when Jeff and I are able to cook together, and I love when we cook dishes from our travels. I get a lot of satisfaction from finishing food without any waste. We all enjoy eating together as a family, especially when each person has contributed to the meal in some way.
• Create a plan. This is a work in progress for us. We’re working to find a balance of meals that we prepare together and are willing to invest a lot of time in versus meals that can be easily prepared with the crock pot or put together in less than an hour, giving us more time outside of the apartment. We’ve started slowly, planning out three days of meals and committing ourselves to following through on them. Smaller steps are less overwhelming, which make them easier for us to take.

Less than a week in, I’ve noticed that having uncluttered space filled with only items we use has relieved a lot of stress. I no longer feel the pressure to make a time intensive meal for which I have a single, slowly expiring ingredient out of the twenty ingredients needed. It’s similar to the ease of getting dressed when your closet contains only clothes that you enjoy wearing. Or letting go of the sewing machine that never made it out of the box. Having a limited number of possibilities has greatly lessened the number of times we give up because of decision fatigue. It has also made us more creative. We haven’t set a specific limit on the number of items we keep in our pantry, but we are functioning on a general understanding of one in, one out and not overfilling the space. This means that in order to buy more food, we first have to use up what we have.

For me, meals are a crucial part of family life. They give us the opportunity to slow down together and beautifully pull us into the same, small space for a period of time. And like many important moments, the food itself is mostly unimportant. But the act of sitting down to a meal together is vital.