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This is supposed to be week 3 of the latest installment to the series Someone Else’s Shoes.  This experience is Money v. Time. On Monday, I posted our spending for May 7 to 13. Today I am supposed to have a  long post for the time part.

But I don’t.

Keeping track of my time in the kitchen totally fell apart last week. I do have some rather incomplete notes for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday but on Thursday everything fell apart and I didn’t keep track at all. About mid day Friday (another crazy day) I realized I wasn’t keeping track. At that point, I decided to bag it.

I decided that 2 weeks of tracking kitchen time was enough. Enough for me and enough to share with you.  I have to admit, I was kind of surprised at the amount of time that we do spend in the kitchen. The two week average daily average was about 1 hour and 45 minutes.

That sounds like alot! Just under 2 hours each day. But when I really think about it, that is not too terribly bad considering that also includes clean up time. Doing the dishes, putting food away and wiping counters takes some time. And did I mention we do not have a dishwasher?  Perhaps a dishwasher would shorten that time.  Clean up itself takes 45 minutes to an hour each day.

1 hour to cook prepare 3 meals each day (mostly) from scratch doesn’t really sound that bad.  That is, of course, an average. I do usually have one day each week that I make up as many things as I can so it is done.  Lot’s of our meals end up being quick things that can be reheated because of this. I think that finding/using a block of time like this works well for me.

Another part of this experience was to go without a menu plan. I am a huge fan of meal planning but for this I did wanted to try something different.  I hate to say that not having a menu plan to follow each day was a challenge for me. And I found myself become even less organized as time went on. One day at 3PM I realized I had no idea what we’d be eating for dinner!  That was not a good feeling.

With the Time part of Money v. Time now officially over, I’m going back to menu planning. It works for me.

I will continue with the Money part of this experience which ends on May 22.  I’ll be back on May 23 to wrap of the experience of Money v. Time.

Do you menu plan?  Or do you have a different method for getting meals put together?