Welcome back to our corner of the toolkit where this week we are getting into more tips regarding meal planning for self-advocates, parents, and professionals. Each tip is meant to focus on the perspective of the group it is directed at but each includes some generalizable advice that you may personally find useful!
Tip for Self-Advocates: When working with a new ingredient for the first time, plan how you are going to use it before you buy.
We talked a little bit last week about how high up front cost represents just one of the obstacles to becoming an expert meal planner. Cost is just one obstacle, but for many of us it’s the most important one and it can be a huge turnoff to realize you just spent a considerable amount of money in your effort to save money! While there is no way to completely avoid up front costs when first building a personal meal planning schedule, there is a way to avoid one of the most common preventable money wasters: spending a bunch of money on an ingredient, then only using a little bit of it before it goes bad and has to be thrown away. As much as many meal planning guides love to tout the potential cost savings of planning and cooking at home, they do not always get into the importance of economizing your ingredients.
Once you are accustomed to your routine in the kitchen it’s much easier to just buy an ingredient that interests you and find a way to incorporate all of it into your meal schedule. But when you’re just starting out it can help to look at the ingredients you are buying, seeing how much of it you need for the main dish you are planning, and how much you will have left over. Can you practice that same dish a few times in a row? Can that ingredient be incorporated into a few different types of dishes? Does it all need to be used ASAP once it has been opened or can you space it out over a few weeks or months?
Answering those questions ahead of time will help you avoid some of the nasty cost surprises that can come with a hobby and habit that is most valuable when it’s helping us manage our costs better. If you are interested in some strategies for planning out how to use a given ingredient, we’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com.
Tip for Parents: Be open about challenges and present alternatives!
Last week we talked about collaborating with your child when it comes to meal planning, and one concern we know can come up with parents sometimes is managing the challenge of what is achievable for meals in a given week versus what their child wants. Try as we may, sometimes reality gets in the way of what we want!
When one of those challenges pops up during meal planning with your child, skipping past it might seem like a good way to avoid discomfort but it can also skip past the fact that your child expressed a real want! Talking about the challenges associated with making a particular meal happen, or making it happen with a particular frequency, is important both as an explanation and an acknowledgement that the things we want still matter even if there’s a need for compromise.
Once we are open about the challenges that come with a particular request, it’s that much easier to present alternatives that can work around those challenges. Your child can then make the choice as to whether they are happy to go with that alternative or would rather try something else entirely.
Tip for Professionals: Start building skills with ingredients that last.
To go hand in hand with our discussion about up front costs in our tip for self-advocates, one way to combat those kinds of challenges is to make dishes with more ingredients that have long shelf lives. Things like flour, dry pasta, beans, and rice can all last for long periods of time and are great bases for meals that may also include a couple of perishable ingredients. If part of your job description includes teaching about cooking, consider featuring the basics of these nonperishable staples early and often. Buying and using up staple ingredients as a significant meal component can be one of the biggest money savers when it comes to meal planning, so make sure your students have this tool in their toolbox!
We hope these tips regarding meal planning continue to be helpful to your in planning your meals or supporting the meal planning of an autistic person in your life. We are also curious to know what people think about our new format - do you like seeing tips aimed at different groups that make up the autism community? Would you rather we go back to articles focused on a single topic? Let us know what you think and other topics you’d like to see us cover at hello@autismgrownup.com, and we’ll be back next week with one more round of meal planning tips!
