It's Wednesday night as I type this, and I am in the midst of meal planning in preparation for a grocery store run tomorrow. As much as I love to cook, there's nothing I like about meal planning. It's sort of like laundry. I like to wear clean clothes, so I do the laundry. I like to cook meals, so I do meal planning. Nothing fun about it.
But tonight's meal planning is made more complicated by the fact that we leave for Orlando on Saturday, and will be back, exhausted I'm sure, sometime Wednesday afternoon. That means that in addition to planning our meals for the next 2 days, and trying to organize what food I need to buy to take in coolers and bags on our trip, I'm trying to plan a meal for Wednesday, so that we won't come home to a totally empty fridge and pantry. I could just forget about it at this point and deal with dinner on Wednesday, but I think that will make my life more complicated, not less. We'd either have to get back in the car to go somewhere for dinner (not ideal for a 1 year old and 4 year old after a 4.5 hour car ride), or we'd have to order pizza (which will inevitably take so long to arrive that I'll yell at the poor guy and everyone will tiptoe around grouchy mommy).
So I'll force myself to plan ahead, since I have to make a grocery run tomorrow anyway. My requirements: it needs to be fast, because it's entirely possible that we'll be pulling in the driveway at 5pm. It needs to be based solely on ingredients I can buy tomorrow. And it needs to be 100% kid friendly while including at least one vegetable.
After wandering through my cookbooks and recipe files (ok, maybe meal planning is slightly better than doing laundry), here's what I've decided on - my trusty P recipe (pasta, peas, prosciutto). I've seen a million versions of this recipe out there, but here's mine:
The P Recipe
8oz Small pasta
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup finely minced onion or shallot (Shallot is better, but really, who keeps a bag of those on hand all the time? Onions are a much more frequent staple around here.)
2/3 cup half & half
10oz package frozen peas
8-10 slices of prosciutto, diced (In my house, this means 8 for the recipe, and 2 for me to roll around a piece of string cheese and munch on while I'm cooking.)
1/2 cup parmesan cheese
Cook pasta according to package instructions. In a large skillet, melt the butter and add the onion/shallot. Cook until soft. Add half & half, peas, and prosciutto. Cook until peas are hot. Taste for salt and pepper. Pour sauce over pasta, add parmesan cheese. Toss well. Happy eating! (And note to self - don't forget the wine!)
