It's "Uptown Art Fair" weekend, which to those of you in the area, you understand perfectly . . . those of you that aren't, imagine one of the largest art fairs in the country, packed into about 8 city blocks, with almost NO parking!
My place of employment is in the thick of all of the art fair madness, and it's been raining off and on, which means the store has been PACKED all weekend long. I'm already exhausted, and I have one more day to go. (Wish me luck!)
So, it's no surprise that I decided to stay home last night when Dan met up with some friends at a different outdoor festival to see a band play. I was more than a little maxed out on crowds!
What did I do? I cooked, of course. I made cornbread muffins, the base for some banana-nutmeg ice cream, butterscotch pudding, the curry sauce for one of our meals later this week, the sauce for tonight's pad thai dinner, started pizza crust for later this week, made a batch of almond milk, and layered coffee and water in the Toddy for this week's coffee.
Oh, and of course, I did all of those dishes, too! :)
I'm going to use my minutes this morning to my advangage, too -- I'm going to put the chili in the crock pot, and churn the ice cream. It might seem a little anal-retentive, but it's good to be prepared. I find having at least one small component of a meal ready to go when I get home from work makes for MUCH less stress!
How do you "deal" with meal-planning? What are some of your tricks?
1 comment:
Ugh...love the art, hate the fairs. Volunteered at the Edina Art Fair this year and it was a disaster (and the event hadn't even started). I'm putting all my fair-ness into the No-Coast Craft Fair in the winter.
Meal planning: I figure out how many meals we'll need for the week or 2-week period and then seek recipes out from cookbooks or bookmarked reicpes.
Then I take a piece of paper, write each recipe name, location, and needed ingredients.
Then I transfer the needed ingredients to a spreadsheet grocery list which is divided by Cub, Valley Natural Foods, Trader Joes and a post-it for the farmers markets.
Sounds like a lot of work, but it's not...it's very streamlined. I then post the recipe list on our cupboard so I remember what I picked out to make that week.
Love your camping food ideas too. It was kinda a bust with the constant rain, thunder and lightening the first night. Then the next night was full of more rain and a tornado touchdown only miles from our campsite. We spent a couple hours in the tornado shelter before hightailing it back to town for the night and picked up our tents today. Ugh.
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