Down a winding garden path

One of the things I've been dealing with since Jay's death is my issues around food.

If I really want to keep my addiction recovery program going strong, I need to cook more. If I want to keep my budget in good shape, I need to cook more. Are we sensing a theme?

And yet, I've been finding myself really disinterested in cooking. Mostly because I can't find things that I want to eat that I can cook.

I found what I hope will be the solution while reading Jay's blog.

Stay with me here - there's a connection, I promise.

I'm in the process of making my third pass through Jay's LJ. The first time, I read through his posts since we met; the second time, I read each day's posts from the beginning of his LJ. This time I am reading each individual post as well as all the comments.

Somewhere as I was reading through his March 2008 posts, it occurred to me to wonder what *I* had been blogging about at the same time. So I wandered over to my now defunct and locked-down original blog and took a look. (That was a fascinating exercise all on its own.)

One of the things I discovered was that for a while in 2008, I posted weekly menus. I was trying to get a handle on what I was eating and trying to learn how to do menu planning, so just like I post my daily trackers now, I was posting weekly menus and talking a little bit about how the previous week went.

Being the good indexer that I am, I even tagged all those posts as "menus".

And there was the answer to my "what the hell am I going to cook" dilemma - I printed out all those menus posts, and marked them up.  I'm going to compile a list of meals and probably keep them in Evernote, since everything in my universe is tucked away in Evernote. That will help me plan my week's food better, and get me back into the habit of going grocery shopping every weekend and spending time cooking ahead. (I don't think I'll ever completely break my habit of eating planned leftovers.)

So to celebrate this momentous occasion, and since so many of the things I used to make were based on things from Trader Joe's, I went and bought a whole bunch of TJ's food. My freezer is now nearly full, which is such a good feeling.