Enough meal planning!

Normally I love the weekly ritual of planning meals and making my shopping list. I look for one-pot type recipes, or search for recipes that include the main and the side, or try to complement the main with the side. Normally I just need five to seven recipes each week because I cook a 2 portion dinner at night and then pack up the second portion for lunch the next day.

But I had a busy Saturday and I wasn't in the mood to meal plan before I went grocery shopping. I just wanted to go out and get it done!  This is a bad plan even if you're living on premade frozen food, but it turns out it's relatively easy on GAPS, probably because the choices are so limited. Here was my strategy:

1. Arrive at store unprepared, with no mental list and no paper list
2. Cruise the meat and fish section and select 5 protein sources (I picked up an organic chicken, which counts as at least three dinners for one person, ground beef, rainbow trout and salmon)
3. Walk through the veggie aisle and select 5 main veggies (for me today, this was kale, cucumbers, snow peas, cauliflower, zuchini)
4. Now that you know what your main veggies are, go back through the veggie aisle and pick up accoutrements for flavor and color (I needed onion, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, bell peppers, tomato and mint)
5. Pick up the standard stuff you buy every week - eggs, kefir, whatever.

I should mention that this works so well because I'm lucky enough to live in a city with a great local chain of markets that focus entirely on real, fresh food.  They actually defeat the standard "shop the edges of the grocery store" rule because the centre of the store is about five aisles of produce.  And the produce always looks great.  How often does kale just leap off the shelf at you?

So with this, I've come up with the following meals for the week

• zuchini mushroom lasagne with broth based tomato sauce
• mashed cauliflower with roast chicken legs
• trout with kale and orange pepper poacked in chicken broth
• chicken breasts stir fried with red and green pepper and mushrooms
• minted cucumber salad with grilled salmon and grilled yellow pepper

Not bad for an ten minute dash through the store! 

My next post will talk about my other strategy for meal planning.  And it will explain why I did NOT feel like doing it today.