Meal Planning in the Empty Nest

A series of posts on adjusting for aging

I’ve been toying with this post, and the others I’m likely going to write centering on the same topic, for some time. We’ve been empty nesters for just over two years now, nominally. There’s been some back-and-forth at the beginning with the young man (who really needs a new blog name since I can’t call him Little Man any longer, he’s almost 21 and serving well in the Navy and besides, taller than both of us!) before his enlistment. We wound up with all his food when he gave up his apartment at that time, which didn’t help the state of the pantry any. We still have stock in the freezers from when he was with us, as well. I’ve been trying hard to reduce all of that. There’s a difference between being prepared, which I will always be for reasons and having more than we can rotate which leads to food waste. I am never happy with food waste, and even knowing the chickens will benefit from it doesn’t help much.

So! This winter I put my foot down and said we were going to eat through the freezers before I did any big stocking-up runs again. When I say I put my foot down I was talking to myself. My husband wavers between happy he got a woman who loves to cook and bake and firmly believes in a deep pantry for reasons, and bewildered by the sheer volume of it. When we had three teenagers at home it made sense. Now that it’s just us?

On Sundays, I meal plan for the coming week. I have a big whiteboard in the kitchen, it’s actually a shower board and part of the wall, so it’s about four feet wide and floor to ceiling eight feet tall. On part of that I keep a list of days of the week and a rough plan for the main meal of the day. Today? meal planning for the week done. Currently that involves me rummaging in the freezers, coming up with 6 or so packages of ‘meat?’ and plotting that on the whiteboard. Right now Monday is listed as ‘mystery meat’ because I’m not entirely sure what is in that bag. I’m on a mission to eat up all the old stock in the freezers before I start refilling it at ‘two old people’ levels instead of ‘stocked for the family’ which is more than we can reasonably rotate through in a timely fashion. One of the reasons it’s taken this long is that when we used stuff up, I would restock to the same level… and that was too much.

I’ve been working at pulling the oldest food out of the freezers, of course, and some of that was put into ziplocs, maybe labeled, and occasionally I wind up finding something so freezer-burned even making it into soup won’t help. That goes to the chickens, sadly. I think the ‘mystery meat’ is a half of a pork loin that was smoked, so it will make very nice soup with a quart or so of the homemade stock also taking up room in the freezers!

Depending on the week, and my schedule, I’ll plan five dinners for the meat I pull out of the freezer. We tend to rely on leftovers for lunches, eggs for breakfast, and once a week I’ll generally label as ‘leftover night’ to clear out any overburden in the refrigerator if we aren’t getting through it at lunch fast enough. The seventh evening is a group dinner with friends, and we rotate who cooks for that, meaning any one of us is only preparing a vast meal once every six or seven weeks. I’m trying to learn how to cook smaller entrees when it is just my husband and I. Until I want to have a fair amount of leftovers, that is. I have to make conscious decisions about the quantity of ingredients, I’m used to making much larger volumes than we need any longer!

Overall, this is just downshifting from feeding a family, to feeding two. I don’t know why that’s such a hard transition to make, but it is. I’m hoping that doing the coming spring where we buy only the essential groceries, the perishables like milk and fruit and veggies… that should help. We may get down to some odd meals, but I do enjoy a cooking challenge, so it will be fun in that way. I’m determined to not look back at three years of empty nest and have to do a mass clear-out of old foods. Being intentional, the way I was about re-purposing my son’s room even when that felt uncomfortable and I had to work at it before I settled into what is now my studio, should help us with the pantry as well.

Hopefully. After 27 years of parenthood, that is a big change. And I keep telling myself that I didn’t get here overnight, I won’t adjust to the empty next overnight, either.