What's cooking today?

Nowadays, the most difficult problem for me is to plan for food at home. I dread the time when my cook comes and asks me "What should I cook today?".

It's due to number of reasons. I never get enough time (mainly due to lack of interest) to find out inventory in my kitchen. Buying stuff in supermarkets is my favorite time-pass. I also enjoy buying vegetables from the street market. It's so much fun. You can roam around aimlessly and decide on which vendor has the freshest vegetables. Also there are so many vegetables out there that one can plan for the meal right there. I love deciding what to cook depending on what vegetables I see in market. Not to mention that I end up buying veriety of things whenever I go for veggie shopping.

Though I like to buy vegetables, I don't get to do that. Our new house is bit far from the market place, so I rarely go for vegetable shopping. Thus I never know what's available either in home or in market. There are very few dishes which one can make without any advance notice, so I have no choice but to choose from one of the vegetables available at home. In short, we end up eating bread-butter from breakfast, beans for lunch and capsicum for dinner (ok, sometimes we cook peas too).

Sigh!

Couple of days back, when I was looking at my outlook meeting calendar, one idea struck me. I decided to prepare a complete menu for breakfast, lunch, dinner for a week. This way, my cook can stock the required vegetables and preplan the soaking, boiling et al. and the biggest relief is that he won't have to come to me to ask the same question everyday.

Deciding what to eat is such a big challenge. When we don't notice, we can afford to gobble as many calories as we can. But when things are put down on paper, the whole equation changes. One becomes extremely "health" conscious. Hmm, if I have aloo-paratha for breakfast, I should have only salad in night. OMG, How can I have Rajma four times a week? And the list goes on....

It took me whole three days to plan the menu, but I am happy with the outcome. It looks colorful and delicious (at least on paper). Now that I am done with it, it will keep on repeating (until we get bored of it).