Meal planning is a great way to optimize nutrition, manage time and reduce expenses.

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Meal planning is a great way to optimize your nutrition, manage your time and reduce your expenses. Our weekly routine involves the preparation of: one soup on the stove, one stew in the crockpot and one casserole in the oven. We do not plan a specific day but base our meal prep on the day that we have the ingredients for the recipes we selected and the energy to complete the three dishes.

We typically make Hungarian dishes since we are writing a Hungarian cookbook, love the food and want to repeat recipes for consistency. This week we are making beef barley soup on the stove, smoky ribs in the crockpot, sweet noodle casserole in the oven and carnival donuts. Carnival donuts are yeast donuts, fried in oil and sprinkled with sugar or filled with plum jam.

Meal preparation requires ingredients, preparation and cook wear. We use the following pieces to cook our food: on the stove we use a 6 quart cast iron covered dutch oven our crock pot is an 8 quart stainless steel slow cooker  our casserole is  a 13 Inch cast iron pan and our fryer is a 1.2 liter oil capacity adjustable temperature stainless steel mini deep fryer with a removable lid