No Menu yet for this week.

I have to go through the very crowded cupboards, shelves, and refrigerator to figure out what I have to work with. I'm trying to change things again. I'm realizing that relying on prepackaged meals is taking a good bit out of our budget. Not enough that it is a disaster, but enough to be notable. So the fiscal angle of going back to cooking more has come up in discussion with Beloved. It was reassuring that he agreed with me that more homecooked dinners would be better on the budget.

We have two major challenges to making menus. The first is diabetes. He and I have it (type 2) and we have to carefully monitor our carb load. I started out food logging and did that for three years. Beloved playfully described it as maniacal how I approached it. I was still in the terrified stage of 'I'm going to die because of this disease.' and writing literally everything I ate and drank felt like the only thing I could do to have a hope of surviving. Looking at how they are approaching Beloved's diabetes, I ground my teeth a bit. He hasn't been prescribed a meter or a food log or given worksheets on how to put together meals. Then I take a deep breath, massage my jaw, and tell myself that my case is more sensitive to changes in meal times, what I eat, and how much water I drink. At one point, I suppose they'd call it more 'delicate' diabetes. 

The other challenge to the business of making menus is the texture and taste sensitivities of my sons. They dislike anything spicy, even if it is pizza sauce with a little garlic in it. Beloved suggested that we make small sample sized portions for the boys to try and still have something like grilled cheese as a back up plan. The other challenge with cooking for the boys is they have a very rigid sense of what should be for dinner on a given night. I'm still going to keep Mondays as hamburger night. For one, the kids are hidebound that is Monday dinner. For two, that is comfort food for Beloved after what is always the most stressful day of the week.

After some discussion last night and the night before when the kids were in bed, we figured out a plan. Because food logging and anxiety kicks in my anorexic eating patterns, we're going to limit that. Instead, we're going to work together to make a cookbook. Long term goal is to type it up and sell copies. One part of the cookbook is going to be recipes. The other is going to be like an encyclopedia of food grouped by type with a list of nutrition facts by serving size. The recipes are going to have similar data in the footnotes. As we were talking, we came to the conclusion there was no cookbooks like that out there for diabetics. And that this type of cookbook will be helpful for people with prediabetes, type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes. Neither of us know how long this is going to take but we're going to work together to get this stuff under control and take notes.