What's for dinner?

When you live in the city that's an easy question to answer: "whatever tickles my fancy on my way home from the park or work." It could be a perfectly cooked chicken from Bouley Bakery, salmon from Whole Foods or chicken korma and naan from the Indian restaurant down the block. The point is that making dinner in the city is spontaneous and usually a mixture of homemade and store bought.

It's a totally different affair in the burbs. I'm not complaining, I'm just stating a fact of life. In the burbs you're not going to just happen to bump into a dinner idea! You have to plan, plan, plan. First you have to come up with an idea, then you have to map out the stores you need to go to (one truth I've discovered is that everyone shops at at least 3 different stores to get there shopping done), then you have to make the entire thing from scratch which takes time and therefore planning.

The other thing I've learned, the hard way is that you have to plan a few meals at a time because otherwise you find yourself grocery shopping every single day (which for me would mean going on some kind of medication!) or your kids and husband end up having cereal for dinner, hate to admit it but both happened regularly the first few months we were here. I always wondered why people had huge freezers and a mini supermarket in their basements, out here...now I know, although that doesn't help me much because I've never been able to plan enough to actually have the time to allow a piece of meat to thaw! Plus I have this image in my head of bacteria furiously multiplying as the meat comes back to room temperature!

There's hope for me yet, tomorrow I'll share some survival strategies I've come up with over the past year! If you're planning to move to the burbs, the food factor is something no one tells you but that you should seriously consider.