Menu planning

Menu planning is a necessity when you have 2 toddlers. I find it impossible to do a full grocery shopping with the 2 of them. Each Sunday Jeremy and I create a menu for the coming week, about 5 or 6 dinners. We recently decided to eat vegetarian at home, since it's healthier, cheaper, and neither of us like dealing with raw meat, so we use our Moosewood vegetarian cookbooks. Those cookbooks are getting dogeared from use and they are wonderful. I usually try to add at least one new recipe a week. Jeremy is an unusual (and tough to cook for) vegetarian as he does not care for mushrooms or eggplant and is allergic to spinach. He also occassionally turns up his nose at cauliflower and broccoli. Really, what kind of vegetarian are you, I like to say.
Recently I made pad thai for the first time. I thought it would be so difficult since you have to soak the rice noodles, but it was much easier than I thought! Finding tamarind paste was another matter, but there was one small jar available at our local Whole Foods that I snatched up. We definitely will be making pad thai again -- I love bean sprouts but they don't seem to agree with Arizona. Last night I went to retrieve the plastic dome of bean sprouts I had purchased on Sunday and discovered instead the carton adrift on a foul sea of bean sprout slime coating the entire glass shelf of my refridgerator. Ew.
So Sunday we draw up the menu and the grocery list and head to Fry's for all of our usual items. Any specialty or unusual items I pick up later in the week at Whole Foods. It is ironic than I never shopped at Whole Foods until I became vegetarian and on Wednesdays when I seem to go, they are always SMOKING MEAT. Sometimes the smoke is so thick it makes my hair and clothes smell. Our Whole Foods is really very elegant, but I do worry how they can stay in business with all of that square footage what with the sushi chef and pastry chef. So each day I select an item from the menu, prep and cook it, and dinner is ready at 5:30. We cut out dessert because I cannot seem to avoid overindulging whereas Jeremy has no problem not eating fresh baked goods. So if I cooked dessert it would only be for myself and trust me, desserts are the last thing this body needs. Maybe someday when my boys have the soccer team over after school...