No, not the one on your laptop and not even those you get at restaurants.  I’m talking the daily grind menu; the one you have to come up with every day to feed your family.  Every single day.  Endlessly.

I realize I have it easy.  We don’t have kids to feed which would complicate the issue.  It’s just us two adults.  But we still have to eat.  For most of my marriage we worked on opposite shifts and when I got home from work in the evenings husband was already at work.  If I didn’t feel like cooking, and I rarely did, I’d eat something from the fridge, usually standing up.  I’d cook on the weekends and that was it.  Heaven.

Now we’re home together in the evenings and the pressure is on.  I recognize it’s a pressure of my own making, that I could probably insist that he get his own meals.  And he would.  But somehow I feel it’s my responsibility to make dinner for us.  If I’m terribly organized I will have made a couple of things over the weekend that we can eat all week.  If I’m not that together I struggle with getting something on the table before 8 at night.  Either way somewhere deep in my inner self I resent the necessity of it all.

The suggestion has been made that we put together a schedule of meals.  A sort of preplanned dining map, one that can be repeated on into the future, with attached grocery lists which will make it easier for the husband to buy the groceries that will be required.  Something totally opposite my usual process which is to go to the grocery store listless, wander around checking out what “looks good” and creating meals spontaneously.  Which I acknowledge hasn’t always worked out that well.

So.

As I sit here in the predawn darkness with my cookbooks surrounding me, trying to plan a month of meals I wonder.  How do other people handle this menu thing?  How do they feed their families day after day, week after week, into the forever future?

Or do you all just resort to those restaurant menus?