What's For Dinner? 🥗
How to simplify cooking & reduce your mental load
ICYMI 👉
A few weeks ago, my teenage daughter texted me at work in the late afternoon:
Of course, my daughter can and does cook. But if you’re anything like me, providing decent meals for your family occupies a fair amount of brain space. Heck, just feeding yourself on a regular basis takes work! Time is precious. Your brain can only hold so much material. And at 5 pm you’re looking for a main-dish miracle.
Enter my friend and fellow writer, David Haddad, aka “Mister Branzino.” This week, I'm featuring a guest post from him. Mister Branzino is a dad and cook with 21 years of experience cooking for his family and friends. He’s on a mission to help parents with young kids become the FAMILY HERO by cooking delicious, simple meals in just two hours a week:
The Meal Machine OS: A 4-Part System To Cook Like a Boss (Without Actually Being in the Kitchen All Day)
Feeding you and your family can be overwhelming. As Dr. McBride writes, fueling your body on a regular basis is critical for your physical and mental health, but it’s easier said than done.
Think about it.
You’re a family of four.
Between breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner there are 5,840 meals per year to consider (4 people x 4 meals x 365 days per year). That’s a lot of planning, shopping, and prepping!
Take a deep breath.
You're here, and I want to help you transform your kitchen chaos into stress-free family dinners with my four-part system.
Enter Meal Machine Operating System
My goal is to simplify your life and turn you into a meal machine for your family. Here are the operating system parts:
Plan
Shop
Cook
Eat
This probably sounds obvious, but laying out the basics here will help you systematize your cooking and reduce the chaos around cooking.
But let’s start simple. In this post I’m going to share ideas for optimizing a family dinner. Of course, you can scale this system to handle breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner.
1. Plan
Fail to plan; plan to fail. The old expression goes.
Without a plan, you're staring into the fridge, hoping for a miracle.
Spend 15-20 minutes on a Friday finding inspiration. Ponder your tastes and desires while walking the dog or taking a quiet moment on the sofa. Maybe you’re feeling like frittata or something else festive for a birthday? Or maybe you read a book about Italy and crave a good pasta sauce?
Use this inspiration from some recipes to build a base of great ingredients for your meals.
Your goal is to prepare a balance of:
1-2 proteins
2 carbs/grains
2 veggies
1 dip or sauce
1 dressing
Yes, this sounds like a lot, but trust me: this is how you give your brain and wallet a break.
Note that we are intentionally creating leftovers to remix them into new meals throughout the week that are fast and easy to prepare.
2. Shop
“Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” - Mike Tyson
I tend to shop on Saturdays.
Because you’ve decided what you’re going to make, you can be efficient in your grocery shopping.
We hit up the local farmer’s market first—great for the kids and local produce—and then alternate between Costco, Whole Foods, or Trader Joe’s.
Bulk-buy proteins, like pork chop or salmon, and freeze them to optimize trips and budget.
You may go to the store planning to make a pork loin but see that there’s a crazy sale on organic chicken. Buy the chicken!
Save the money and change your recipe. This is how grandmas shop.
The more you plan and shop this way, you’ll be able to stay nimble and pivot if you need to to save a few bucks.
3. Cook
The actual cooking happens on Sunday, and it’s a 1.5-hour culinary blitz. Insert some fun! Play music, make it social. Try to enjoy the process—not just the hope of a decent outcome.
You should cook proteins first, then carbs, then veggies, then your dips, sauces and dressing.
Be sure to start with the rate limiting steps like preheating your oven or boiling that pot of water. Waiting for these steps kills your efficiency in cooking.
Involve your kids! Have them chop something or mix a marinade with you. They break an egg. That’s okay.
The memories are priceless.
You’ll take these base ingredients you made and turn them into soups, salads, bowls and tacos/wraps.
For example, let’s say you bake a chicken on Sunday. Shred some into a salad on Monday, tacos on Tuesday and a tortilla soup on Wed.
Now it’s Tuesday and you have some leftover roasted broccoli. Sauté it with some onion. Add four eggs and some cheese and BOOM—you’ve got yourself a country omelet. Add a small salad, and you have a healthy complete lunch or dinner.
With this operating system, dinner comes together on the dining table in less than 15 minutes throughout the week.
It’s about reusing, remixing, and reducing stress.
👉 Resource: Check out my swipe file of my favorite recipe sources.
4. Eating
This is where the magic of family time comes alive.
Family dinner is the most sacred time of the day.
This is the time we get to connect with our loved ones, fuel our bodies, and build connections.
Budget permitting, intersperse family dinners with occasional dining out to keep things exciting and taste new flavors to inspire your cooking for the week.
👉 Resource: I shared some of my family rules and dinner conversations in an earlier post.
***
That’s it.
The Meal Machine operating system isn't just about food; it's about feeding your body and brain healthy stuff, working smarter (not harder) at everyday tasks, and spending quality time with loved ones.
Death to Delivery!
-Mister Branzino
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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are entirely my own. They do not reflect those of my employer, nor are they a substitute for advice from your personal physician.
Another lifesaver of a surprise for us from Dr. Lucy!
True Seeing: When the veils of our ideas and opinions are thin enough so we can see and know things as they are rather than staying stuck in how we want them to be, our vision becomes generous, healing, and peaceful. And it is felt by others instantly. And not just by humans. Many ancient traditions believe the world feels our seeing and sees us right back. To be seen by nature and to be seen as we truly are and to know that we are an intimate part of the sensuous world and not a fragmented, isolated individual. We are all in this together. We are all part of the same world.
‘In a real sense all life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.’
Martin Luther King Jr. / Written in a letter from Birmingham Jail.
This is my story. It's how I always felt like I didn't belong. I never had a home. And I am sixty-seven years of age. Pacing my lonely retirement cage.