This is the meal plan I've followed for years and perhaps it and the others I've posted will help you out a bit to build one for yourself. I like it because I can switch days or leave them out completely if necessary. Many of the basic foods are prepared in advance and portioned in the freezer in serving sizes (2 people for us). That would include spaghetti sauce, freezer mashed potatoes, soup/stew/chili, taco meat, etc. You could easily rearrange the choices to work best for you. I don't like to work out a "perfect" menu, but I like the guidelines I've set out for myself. I know if I have a few simple ingredients on hand - shredded cheese, lettuce and other fresh veggies, and a well-stocked freezer, no meal is very far away. MONDAY: Big Meal Includes a large cut of meat that will also serve as leftovers, possibly sandwich meat, base for stir fry; and served with all the "normal" side dishes that go along with that type of meat. Usually there is enough leftover to freeze a portion to use later. Baked chicken or roast beef also get used to make soup. Occasionally when I don't have time to make the whole meal from scratch I'll use whatever has been waiting the freezer (leftover roast turkey or beef, etc.) TUESDAY: Leftovers It may take on a completely different look than what was served on Monday - your choice. If you don't like leftovers the next day, use them on Wednesday instead. WEDNESDAY: Stir-fry If you prepared vegetables on Monday or Tuesday that can be prepared in advance to include in this meal you'll save time by chopping enough on the previous days. Use a combination of fresh and frozen veggies. Almost any kind of meat can be used for stir-fry - both raw or pre-cooked. Serve with a side of rice and fresh fruit for dessert. I might take a large amount of meat (chicken or steak for instance) and cook it and portion it for the freezer and used later for more stir-fry meals, or used as the meat topping on a dinner salad, or used in a wrap on sandwich day. THURSDAY: International Usually something Italian or Mexican using spaghetti sauce and some kind of pasta or taco meat (which are already portioned in the freezer). Both meat bases can be used in a plethora of things. FRIDAY: Vegetarian A great way to save on our most expensive food item - meat. If you don't have time for a traditional breakfast, it could be a good time for pancakes or crepes. Something egg, cheese or bean based. SATURDAY: Soup and/or Sandwich We're always busy on Saturday, so instead of eating out, having the freezer stocked with homemade soup and fixings for sandwiches on hand (as well as wraps and other sandwich-type things) saves time and money. SUNDAY: Homemade Pizza or a Dinner Salad Homemade pizza is a good way to use up small amounts of leftover meat and clean the vegetable bin. When the weather is too hot for baking pizza, or the garden is in full swing, those same meat and vegetable ingredients make a great dinner salad. All meals include nature's "FAST FOOD" which are fresh vegetables of some kind and fresh or canned fruit for dessert. The freezer is stocked with homemade tortillas, homemade burger and hot dog buns, homemade dinner rolls, cornbread (all wrapped in foil in servings for one or two) ready to reheat. ------------------------------------------------------ Here's another eating plan I jotted down from a book I read years ago: -Meat on Sunday and Wednesday -Casseroles/Leftovers Monday and Thursday -Pasta - Tuesday -Fish, eggs, cheese - Friday -Soup and or Sandwich - Saturday -------------------------------------------- This one I read on-line: Monday - Pasta Tuesday - Soup, salad, and/or sandwiches Wednesday - Stir-fry Thursday - Crock-pot Friday - Pizza Saturday - Something new Sunday - Something easy -Grainlady

Giia everyone has made great suggestions re: chewing meat, nuts and seeds, dietary issues, fresh vs freezing. You will have varying factors to which you will have to adapt the meals. Also herbs and spices can be issue, either the elders can't tolerate them or their taste buds are such that they want more seasoning. You'll figure it out as you go. Amck, God bless you for helping your parents. Helping my elderly family was very rewarding and yes frazzling at times. (The whole "tour of duty" lasted a span of 15 years culminating with my Dad moving in with us for his last 7 years. Yup 22 years total. Oh and I worked full time. Whew!) My aunts and uncles either never married or did not have children and I'm an only child so I became the caregiver for 6 elderly folks all at the same time. They were all very appreciative which made it so much easier. The Drs. appt's, weekly medicine set up, cooking, interviewing and overseeing housekeepers made it hectic. Cooking for them was my favorite part but I gave up my whole day every Sunday to do it. The bonus was I didn't have to cook for my family all week since the meals were already made. My kids were little so we made a game out of it and they learned to cook. At the end of the day we would "visit" all the relatives while we delivered the meals. I wouldn't change a thing! I'm very fortunate that my in-laws were younger at the time and even now are spry at 80 and 83 and self sufficient. When the time comes, we'll do it again for them.

We grow what we like to eat, first and foremost, so that we are motivated to eat it later on regardless of how it is preserved. My first preference always is to eat fresh, in season, but the reality is that if you only eat fresh, in-season food, then you may find yourself eating so much food during its relatively brief fresh season (like asparagus, for example) that you get sick of it, but then later on you find yourself craving it out of season. I love aspragus but even I don't want to eat it every day during the couple of months it is producing,so we eat it fresh several days a week and freeze the rest. I try to freeze in the manner that is most productive for cooking later on---for example, cutting the produce into bite sized pieces before freezing it and freezing it in batches that are the right size for a meal. That makes cooking it quick and easy in the off-season. With raw materials that can go into meals, like chopped frozen onions, I freeze in 1/2 or 1 cup amounts that can be used with the recipes from which I prepare meals. Like Dorothy, our garden is a food-preserver's garden, which is quite different from a fresh-eating only garden, because you do get vast amounts (as planned) of produce in-season and you have to deal with it in a timely manner. Every day begins with harvesting in the early morning hours and I plan that day's meals around what we have, setting aside that amount of produce for fresh eating. The rest gets preseved via canning, freezing, dehydrating or fermenting, or is root cellared (potatoes, onions, etc.). When I plant cabbage, for example, in late winter, I know we are not going to want to eat cabbage daily for a couple of months, so I am careful not to plant too much. The excess harvest always becomes sauerkraut or sometimes freezer slaw or it gets used in a chow chow or relish recipe. This year I fermented four batches, three of cabbage sauerkraut, and the fourth a hot sauerkraut that included hot peppers and carrots. All are through fermenting and canned now and that's a good thing because it is hard to keep our west-facing kitchen cool enough for proper fermentation in July and August. We do use our preserved food, but that is a very deliberate choice. I wouldn't spend all the time growing and preserving it if we weren't going to use it. I value the time and money invested in the garden too much to waste the harvest. You do have to make a very deliberate decision to plan meals around the food you grow and to take the time to cook them. It is a lot more work to prepare home-cooked meals from scratch versus using convenience foods (like Hamburger Helper or whatever) and fast food, but I try to make the bulk of our meals healthy ones from our garden. First of all, they taste better. Secondly, we know how this food was raised. Third, huge amounts of fossil fuels weren't used to transport the food from our garden to our house and that matters to me. I don't know how long we as a world can keep transporting food an average of 1500 miles from the place where it is grown to the grocery stores where it is sold. To me, growing and eating our own produce is part of our effort to live a more sustainable lifestyle that is not based on burning excessive fossil fuels. There are gazillions of ways to use fresh food. You can, for example, make sorbet out of almost anything you raise in terms of fruit, or you can make chips---I like kale chips and okra chips. Frozen food can be used in many ways. It is all about how you choose to use your time. I have tons of vegetable cookbooks with creative ways for using produce, so that we don't get stuck in a rut and eat the same old produce cooked the same old way every time. Some of my favorite veggie cookbooks are very old ones from Southern Living magazine, published decades ago when cooking meals from scratch was still considered an important art, not a waste of time. My time goes into the garden, harvesting the produce, cooking with it, and preserving it. That is the choice I make. I get somewhat amused at gardeners (and I bet we all know people like this) who grow all kinds of food, and take photos of their harvest and post those photos almost daily, but who rarely eat the food they grow. I feel like the 'social media generation' (who often are quite a bit younger than I am) love gardening for a different reason than I do---some of them seem to love it for the joy of growing the food and of photographing it and putting it on their FB pages, but they may not yet have mastered actually using very much of it. I have high hopes that their love of growing it eventually will lead to them actually using it for more than photos. Some young adults who grew up on convenience food and fast food have to make a very concerted effort to learn how to prepare and use the produce they raise because, perhaps, they didn't grow up in a home where meals regularly were prepared from scratch. I feel very lucky because my dad always grew produce and cooked from scratch (and he canned as well), while my mom abhorred the work involved in doing that, so when she cooked, it was often using convenience foods. This led to an amusing conversation with my brother in the early 2000s when he remarked that our mom didn't make very special meals on weekends, but that the weekend meals were great. I looked at him, wondering what planet he was from, and informed him that was because our dad did the bulk of the weekend cooking. I couldn't believe my brother grew up in the same household and never made the connection between the weekday vs. weekend meals and who was doing the cooking. It make me laugh out loud and ask him if he wasn't paying attention to who was in the kitchen in our childhood! He seemed completely baffled as our other siblings and I assure him that it was indeed Dad who was largely producing those great weekend meals. As an adult, I made a deliberate choice to pursue gardening, cooking and canning like my dad did and to largely avoid convenience food cooking. Have grown up eating both kinds of meals, I knew what I preferred and that was what I wanted for our family too. When I am in the garden, as much as I enjoy being out there, I never lose sight of the fact that my garden is a working garden. I'm not out there to play around, take photos, visit with friends, conduct garden tours, or to sit in a nice chair, sipping a glass of iced tea, and chilling and relaxing. That is not my reality. Particularly, I am out in the garden to work hard quickly (to both beat the heat and avoid the snakes), bring in the harvest and spend the rest of the day using it and preserving it. It is a job, truly, and not a hobby or a past-time, but it is a job I love and a job I enjoy doing overall, though there are occasional days that I hate it because I find myself working from sunrise until well after dark and that gets tiring. So, yes, we use what we grow, but it is because we choose to do that, and because we have developed the self-discipline to use what we grow and to not waste it. If we aren't using it, I yank it out and replace it with something we will use. Right now, with all our tomato preservation needs met/exceeded for this year, I am yanking out tomato plants right and left and replacing them with new crops for fall. It is a somewhat thankless task to be doing this on a hot July day, but I do it because I want to have a great harvest in late summer, autumn and winter. It also leaves some of my tomato-growing friends (who don't preserve their harvest) appalled that I remove plants still capable of producing, but I always keep enough tomato plants for fresh eating, and anything beyond that is a waste of space because I'm through preserving tomatoes for this year. Because we live in a rural area where families are very tied to the land and many gardens are multi-generational, where the grandparents, parents and grandkids (and sometimes great-grandparents and great-grandkids) all eat from the garden and help preserve the food from it, I had lots of encouragement and support from some of those multigeneration garden families in our neighborhood when I first started growing/preserving our food here. Mostly, though, they just served as an inspiration for me---I wanted to grow enough food to put up huge harvests like they did. As time went on and our garden produced all we could use and preserve, I noticed that these same multigenerational family gardens all hit the same point that mine did---the production level reached a point where nobody wanted to can another tomato. It became amusing as one friend or another would call and ask if we wanted or needed any more tomatoes (or okra or whatever) because they were through with their canning for the year and their plants still were producing. Many of them, like me, were growing 100-200 tomato plants in spring to meet their fresh eating and preservation needs. It made me realize we all were just alike---growing more than we can eat even though we preserve a great deal of it. To live this sort of edible gardening lifestyle is a deliberate choice. If you like gardening, but don't like using or preserving the produce, then why not just switch over to more ornamental gardening and less edible gardening? Our garden is multipurpose, providing not only fresh and preserved fruits, veggies and herbs, but also flowers for cut flower bouquets and pumpkins, gourds, amaranth and other ornamental decorative items for fall porch displays or table displays. If I don't fill up a lot of our growing space with flowers and only use it all for edibles, I'd never sleep because I'd be too busy preserving food. There's always room to grow some ornamental/decorative items or to grow compost crops to feed the compost pile or to grow cover crops to hold the soil When you are preserving food, why not use it later on? It is so wasteful to grow it and preserve it but then not to use it. I am happy every single time that we walk through a grocery store and aren't buying food that I have a home---whether that food is fresh and sitting on the kitchen counter or in the fridge, or if it is frozen, dehydrated, fermented, canned, etc. I love breezing through the produce section and only buying, let's say, lettuce, bananas, apples and grapes in summer or cranberries in fall or whatever. I love skipping the frozen food section (except to buy waffles and ice cream) because our own home-grown food fills the freezer. There's a part of me that gets very tired of the summer workload, but not tired enough to stop doing it. Every time there is news of yet another food-induced illness involving salonella, e. coli, etc. on produce, I am grateful we raise our own and don't have to risk bringing home some disease on grocery-store produce. I don't even like buying lettuce in summer, but Tim must have his salad, so we buy it and then we just have to hope we aren't buying contaminated produce. I'm happier fall through spring when we have our own lettuce and salad greens. Many people go to the grocery store and buy food and plan their meals around that purchased food and there's nothing wrong with that, but we are exactly the opposite when we go to the store. We already have planned our meals based around the food we have, whether fresh or preserved, and we just buy whatever we might need to make those meals complete. That's our preference, always. When we eat something like a purchased pizza, I still always joke with my family that "I grew this on the pizza tree out back" and we laugh. I do can pizza sauce and we do make homemade pizzas too, but there is room in everyone's life for a little fast food or convenience food as well. Dawn

Since refrigeration space is an issue, I'd look at ordering irradiated milk. One thing we used to take camping, was those specialty dry Italian sausages. They are great for mini-charcuterie boards for snack times/lunches, but can also be thrown into omelettes, pizzas, etc. Also, our favourite specialty cheeses come completely wrapped in a wax outer cover and keep forever. Do take things like garlic, shallots, ginger that don't need refrigeration, but are essential if fish is caught. However, don't count on fish being caught. I'm addicted to sailing vlogs and it seems that sometimes there are not as many fish waiting to take a hook as you might think. Very jealous. As I said, I'm addicted to sailing vlogs and I'm trying to convince the rest of my family to come on a charter with me in Panama next winter. So far they are unconvinced, but I've got a whole year to work on them.