Anyone who likes to experiment in the kitchen will tell you that having so many recipes under their belt can be both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, you have so many recipes to choose from when it’s time to prep your meals; on the other, making the choice can be quite difficult when you have too many options. An article on the New York Times goes as far as calling the problem of having too many choices “a paralyzing problem”.
You’re bound to experience these paralyzing choices more often with the Yuletide Season rolling in, but luckily, you can use a fun bingo game to create meal plans and menus, eliminating the hassles of having to rifle through the hundreds of recipes you’ve mastered to be able to prepare something new for your family every day. Bingo has helped many households in surprising ways, with the UK Food Standards Agency even using it to promote healthy eating with Eatwell Bingo, and even Iceland Foods has been unable to resist the charms of the industry, launching Iceland Bingo in 2012. Now bingo can help you and your family too, all while making meal planning much more fun and interactive.
To play Menu Bingo, go through your recipe books for five recipes for each of the following categories: Main, Side 1, Side 2, and Dessert. Once you have these twenty recipes, you can then plot them out on a bingo card template, with one column standing for each category. Label each item in the columns a number from 1-5. You could also fill out there boxes by asking the members of the family what they feel like having and taking those down. Once you’ve made your bingo card, it’s time to roll a die, with the number that you roll corresponding to the dish that you’ll be cooking. Take turns rolling the die for each category, and when someone rolls a six, they get to choose which of the items to have. Once an item has been picked already, make sure to mark it off, and then proceed to roll for the rest of the days of the week.
You can have many variations of this game, such as a bingo card with seven items in each category – one for each day of the week – or even a bingo card each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. By taking some time out of the start of the week, you can cut back on your cooking prep time!