Creativity in the kitchen – menu planning made fun

I love to cook, about that there can be no doubt. I love to eat well. I love to play with ingredients and flavours. I love the challenge of making something tasty out of what’s on hand. I love to step back and admire a lovely, lovingly prepared plate of food.

This means I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. To make that a bit easier, my kitchen just got a make-over. Pragmatically, we needed a few things to accommodate our family’s unique needs and wants.

High on the list of reasons for the renovation was that we needed more pantry space and a better approach to manage meal planning. More than once in the early days of our blended family adventure I was reduced to tears trying to make everyone happy with what we had in the cupboard. Having to come up with a meal on the spot every day was stressful to say the least.

One of the boys has some anxiety about food because he was raised with food as a battle ground. It is my firm belief that forcing a child to eat will only create a picky eater. No one, not even a child, likes to have no control over what they put in their mouths.

The best planning tactic I found to alleviate my stress and the boys’ anxiety is to write the meal plan for the two weeks my husband’s sons are with us on our calendar so we can all see it ahead of time. I leave the experimenting and improvisation for when it’s just my husband, my son and I because we have fewer issues with food.

Meal planning feels like a chore most of the time; partly because the lack of spontaneity removes the creative side of cooking that I love so much. As a parting solution, the contractor for our kitchen renovation made the meal planning fun for me. She suggested I hang a chalk board on the tiled wall next to the stove to write the meals on.

I bought myself a box of coloured chalk and am having so much fun writing menus it is ridiculous.

Now the boys don’t just know what’s for dinner, they get to decide if the meal is as good as advertised – then decide if the chef or the artist get higher marks for presentation.