“What do we want for dinner tonight??”

I ask my partner this question several times per week even though I do actually try to have a plan for at least half of the week. I typically do my meal planning and grocery shopping on Saturday or Sunday when I have more time. I actually do enjoy meal planning to some degree because I get to look at all of the choices of meals my partner or I could make. What gets overwhelming is that now I have too many options, and I’m someone who does better with limited choices. I have somewhere around 100 cookbooks and most have, on average, 100 recipes so right there are 10,000 options. That’s a lot to weed through. On Pinterest I’ve pinned 2,200 recipes. And then on the Food Network app, I’ve saved 4,210 recipes. (Yes I did do the math for both of apps.) And then there’s the internet with what seems like an infinite number of choices. So that’s 16,410 + infinity! And then I just remembered that I subscribe to 3 bi-monthly magazines (Bake from Scratch, All Recipes, and Cook’s Country) with even more endless choices. So how do I decide?

This doesn’t happen often, but I am sometimes craving something specific that I know I want to make. If you remember from my post on organizing recipes, I can search for that recipe on the Eat Your Books website to see if any of my current cookbooks or magazines have anything that matches. Or if there’s an ingredient that needs to be used before it goes bad, I can search for that item to see what recipes pop up. But I’m not usually someone who thinks, “I know exactly what I want to make” and then go find it.

More often than not, I need my cookbooks to tell me what to make. That’s a large part of the value of cookbooks for me personally. They give me so many new ideas of things to make. Some are for dishes that are new to me. For example, I made Brussels sprouts colcannon. I’ve never had regular colcannon which has cabbage. But one of my cookbooks, “Modern Irish Food,” had this recipe for Brussels sprouts colcannon, and since I really like Brussels sprouts, I decided to try it when making an Irish dish for St. Patrick’s Day. Turns out, it was quite tasty, and I would make it again even if it wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day.

Other times the ideas from cookbooks just offer maybe a different way to use an ingredient or a new way to combine them that I hadn’t thought of. Recently I made crispy buffalo chicken roll-ups from the “Taste of Home 5 Ingredient Recipes.” I’ve had buffalo chicken tenders, I’ve had stuffed chicken that was rolled up, and I’ve had crispy chicken. But this combo proved to be simple to make, only 5 ingredients like the title promised, and quite tasty. I would never think to search for this recipe because I didn’t know it was a thing - I needed someone to present it to me to make. And that’s what cookbooks do well.

So how do I look through all 100 of my cookbooks to find these crispy buffalo chicken roll-ups that I didn’t know existed? I don’t. I will usually pick just one cookbook and flip through it to see what sounds good to make. This helps give me a finite number of choices and gets me to use different cookbooks throughout the year. I had just received the “Taste of Home 5 Ingredient Recipes” cookbook through a Taste of Home subscription box that I get once a season. So that was my cookbook of choice to try to find something to make. I actually found another recipe in there for pecan-coconut crusted tilapia that I made too, and it was really good as well. Since I had such good luck, I picked another recipe out of there to make this week, grilled lemon dill shrimp. It was good except for I overcooked the shrimp which I often do to my proteins out of a “rather be safe than sorry” mentality.

Still in other instances, I’ll pick a board or category on Pinterest or the Food Network Kitchen app. Again it’s narrowing down the choices to make it less overwhelming. Or if I’m watching “The Pioneer Woman” or “The Kitchen” on Food Network, I will make something from a show that recently aired.

If I want to look through recipes I’ve already made to make something again, I explained in my organizing recipes post about how I have a document where I keep a running list of the new recipes I’ve made. When I look through this list, there are usually some dishes that I had forgotten about. So this is a great way to make food that is worth repeating.

Hope this helps you decide what to make for dinner tonight!

What’s for Dinner??