A guide to dining in - menu planning

Nation's Business, August, 1993 by Phyllis M. Barrier

How many times have you promised yourself that you'll start eating better? How many times have you said that you'll start eating more meals at home?

Let's face it: No matter how carefully we order, we tend to consume more calories and fat when we eat out. Many times we eat meals out not because we want to but because there's nothing at home we can put on the table quickly.

How many times have you said that you'll start bringing your lunch to work? Many times we don't pack a lunch because we didn't buy anything to pack, or we didn't allow time to pull it together.

We're all concerned about what we eat, but work, family, and other demands on our time sometimes make healthful eating difficult. But it is possible to eat in a healthful and time-efficient way.

The first step is planning. At work, you use daily planners, calendars, and to-do lists to organize your time; you should do the same before you go food shopping. You'll more than make up the time spent and eat better too.

On a calendar note the obligations you have during the upcoming week: tickets to a concert on Tuesday; exercise class on Monday and Wednesday; business lunches and dinners; weekend activities.

This first step shows you when you won't be eating dinners at home, days you won't need to pack a lunch, and evenings when you'll be getting home late and need something quick and easy to eat--but not a high-fat carry-out dinner.

Next, start your menu planning. Go through your calendar and write on it what you want to eat, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. As you do this, make your food shopping list. (There are printed lists available that can make this go faster.)

For breakfasts, let's say you plan to eat cold cereal with bananas, bagels with light cream cheese, oatmeal with toast, eggs and English muffins, and pancakes on the weekend. Since you have English muffins in the freezer and oatmeal in the pantry, your shopping list might include skim or 1 percent milk, orange juice, bread, four bagels, light cream cheese, and bananas.

Let's say you have two business lunches scheduled, and you always eat with a friend one day a week; that means you'll want to plan lunch for two days. Your food shopping list might include tuna packed in water or sliced turkey, two pieces of fruit, nonfat fruited yogurt, or anything else you like for lunch. If you have a microwave oven at work, your list could include frozen dinners (low-fat ones, of course) and hard rolls, plus fruit and yogurt.

As for dinners, for the two nights you have exercise class, you'll probably want something fast and easy--but healthful. Maybe a baked potato, microwaved, served with cottage cheese and salsa (try it, you'll like it!), or a homemade pita pizza (bottled low-fat spaghetti or pizza sauce smeared on a pita, topped with 1/2 to 3/4 ounce of low-fat mozzarella, red or green pepper, slices of garlic, and herbs, and heated until the cheese has brown spots just like a real pizza).

You can also plan to eat leftovers (or double a recipe and freeze) for nights when you know you'll be getting home later than usual. If you're getting home late because of food shopping, pick up a salad from the supermarket's salad bar for dinner. If your business lunch is going to be your main meal one day, perhaps you can plan on a sandwich for dinner. Whatever you decide, write your menu plans on the calendar, and then add the foods you'll need to your shopping list.

You'll also want to include some healthful snacks on that shopping list, like pretzels, low-fat microwave popcorn, the new baked (not fried) corn chips, graham crackers, fat-free cookies, and frozen low-fat yogurt. We all need a snack occasionally and also something to serve if someone drops by unexpectedly--but the snacks you keep in the house should be healthful ones. When you have a craving for gourmet ice cream, eat one scoop out, at an ice cream store. You'll do a lot less damage than if you have a quart of it in your freezer.

When you're writing in your calendar, it's a good idea to pencil your menus in. You may get an unexpected invitation for dinner on Friday, so you can erase and move that meal to the next week.

To take your menu planning a step further, you may want to keep an inventory of things you put in the freezer. Keeping a running inventory, with the date each item was purchased, will help with menu planning and save you money. (How many times have you found a piece of meat suffering from freezer burn after being in the freezer too long?)

When you are at the food market, it's a good idea to stick with your food shopping list. The broccoli, spinach, green beans, and zucchini may be beautiful--and certainly good for you--but don't buy more vegetables than you have on your list. If you only need three vegetables for the next 10 days, the extras that you buy won't be beautiful when you need vegetables again.

You do need to be flexible, though. Perhaps you planned to buy skinless, boneless chicken breasts, but when you got to the store, the turkey cutlets were cheaper. Of course, you'd want to switch.