Meal plans/how to make “The Perfect Baked Potato”

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So, my current goal is to come up with a weekly meal plan.  I’m REALLY hoping that this will help me out with some of my reluctance to cook dinner!  I feel like there are just some days when I don’t feel like cooking, and then I use the excuse that I have no idea what to cook, and procrastinate until nine o’ clock at night and we end up eating corn dogs out of the freezer.  If I have my meals set, then I don’t even have to think about it! Well, ok, knowing me I’ll have to spend an entire three minutes remembering what day it is in the first place, but that’s much better than what I’ve been doing!  So, my idea is this, I’m making a list of every meal I can possibly think of to make (and that I know my DH will eat after I get it made!) and then taking into account things like which days I have class until late in the evening, or days when I don’t have many classes and will be able to put more time into the preparation.  Then I’ll assign meals to days accordingly.  With a little help from my dearest Mr. Smith, I hope this will be a success!

The first time I considered this plan I got really excited, and then realized that I was having a VERY hard time coming up with seven different dinner ideas.  I finally figured something out and put my now half-hearted plan into action.  Baked potatoes from the microwave were the last meal I finally eked out of my head and the day to make them rolled around.  I made the potatoes, made my DH eat them, they weren’t very good, and he told me that he didn’t really want to eat baked potatoes ever again.  I was devastated.   My seventh meal had just been vetoed and I didn’t know what to do.  So I quit, as I am so apt to do when my plans fail.  However, after a period of grieving I’m back in the saddle and with a little research and experimentation, I have come up with a solution to my problems!  It is my version of “The Perfect Baked Potato”!  Baked potatoes are now DH’s favorite meal!  So here’s how I made my poor potatoes edible (warning, this is not an extra healthy low fat/no calorie method of baking a potato!): 

1.       Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

2.       Wash your potatoes and get all that yucky dirt off/cut any bad spots off the potatoes.

3.       With a fork, stab each potato 4 times down the length of the potato on each side (so 8 stabs all together).

4.       Rub the skin of each potato with olive oil.

5.       Sprinkle a little bit of salt onto the potato and distributed it evenly over all the entire skin.  You don’t need too much, just enough to give the skin a little flavor :)

6.       Sprinkle a couple of dashes of garlic powder onto the skin and rub all over.

7.       Put the potatoes directly on to a cookie sheet and cook for 45 minutes.

8.       When the potatoes are done they should be tender when you stick a fork in them.  Now you’re ready to eat them!  Throw on all your favorite baked potato toppings (cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, peas, bacon, ranch dressing, onions, or even just salt and pepper!) and enjoy!