MEAL PLANNING
Meal planning can be intimidating to beginning cooks. Take a few minutes to organize your recipes and read through this article to help you begin, and soon meal planning will be second nature. To make things even easier, here are three key words: temperature, texture, color.
Meeting your and your family's nutrition needs is the number one concern when planning meals. The old way of planning meals was the Basic Four: Meats, Vegetables and Fruit, Grains, and Dairy. After many nutrition studies, the USDA has created an updated Food Pyramid that should be used as a guideline. This graphic is courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Note serving amounts next to each group. The range helps the Pyramid fit into anyone's caloric needs. For serving sizes, see Thrifty Living.
Meal planning used to start with a chunk of protein, then added a starch like potatoes or rice, a vegetable like green beans, and a glass of milk. Today, meat is considered more of a condiment or flavoring, and diets should be based more on grains, fruits and vegetables. That doesn't mean you can't have a steak or fish fillet for dinner! It just means that you should add more whole grain breads, pastas, vegetables, fruits, rice, and cereals, reduce the amount of meat served, and don't have meat at every meal. Meals should be full of color, have variations in temperature, and include texture from smooth to crunchy.
First, go through your recipe box, files, cookbooks and other favorite sources and choose 10-20 recipes that you know you can make and your family likes. Then consider texture, temperature, and color when visualizing your full dinner plate. Color is probably the most important consideration. Nutritionists advise making your plate look like a painter's palette. The more different colors on your plate, the more varied and healthy your diet will be. Texture and temperature should be varied to add interest and make the meal more pleasing to the palate. Now let's choose a recipe to start.
Next Pages: Sample Menu, More Hints and Tips
