Putting food on the table. Ep 14

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Hunger. I'm a mother of two and soon to be three and a practicing physician. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to Best of Both Worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Hi, this is Laura. This is episode fourteen of Best of Both Worlds. Today we are going to be talking food, all things food and meal planning. Well. Sarah was talking recently with us about some good meals she's had out recently, some slightly subversive meals, right, Sarah, Yeah, you can be subversive with your meals when you're pregnant. Sometimes everyone has about what you should be eating when you're pregnant. Yes, and I will. I think I stuck mostly to the guidelines for numbers one and two. But we went on a movie date and I simply had to have some sushi. So I did a little bit of research, and I am not dispensing medical advice here as I never will on this podcast, by the way, but decided for myself that the evidence looked like it was safe to just go for it. And it was awesome. Yeah, sushi is awesome, especially if you haven't had it in like seven months. Yeah, because I had been avoiding it or just eating the cooked stuff, which really is not all that satisfying. But you know, I'm pretty sure like Japanese women eat sushi when they're pregnant. I can actually vouch for that. I worked with a resident who was Japanese and she did eat sushi, and she would just ignore people's faces, like French women eat soft cheeses and so forth. I think a lot of the pregnancy advice is not based on a whole lot of solid research, partly because people don't do research on pregnant women exactly, which is reasonable. But then it really does kind of slow progress a little bit. Yeah, it does. The day we're recording this, I'm going out to eat tonight with my husband. I'm very excited about that. We're having date night Yay. But it's just going to be at this like brewery, so probably be burgers and beer, which is fine. I love burgers and beer on a Friday evening. That is just perfection to me. But a couple of weeks ago I had to be I was a little bit more adventurous. I went out for Malaysian food with some fruits. What was good there? What is I don't even tell me about a Malaysian gink Asian? But it's like slightly more I guess maybe Islands. But I'm going to totally screw that up. I know nothing about We're going to hear from listeners who are like, you have no idea what you were talking about, which is probably true. So in fact, because I had no idea what I was talking about, I just asked the waitress to pick something for me. And I would highly recommend that as a strategy for ordering at a place where you know nothing about the cuisine, because I mean, the server has seen, no doubt people who are not that ethnicity attempt to order food and botch it horribly, and she or he will know what is good and what is crowd pleasing. And so the woman just said, well, do you like beef? And I'm like sure. She said, well, this is a just mildly spicy beef, but a lot of people like it. That sounds awesome, and it was telling me it was good done, satisfice their way to go. I think that's awesome. I would do that even in a cuisine I did know if I just didn't feel like thinking about it that much. It's like a it's like a fixed you know, like the chef's table without actually having to pay the markup, you know. And yes, if it wasn't so expensive, I'd love to do that every time I went out. But tends to be the higher in restaurants. But this is a this is a food episode, our main segment. We want to talk about meal planning and the idea of getting dinner on the table and all the baggage that comes with that and the thought processes and all that and the tips and strategies because I know for a lot of working parents the issue with dinner. Like, you want to do well by your family, you want to have healthy food, want to eat together as much as you can if that works for you, guys in your schedule, but like it's six o'clock, you're tired, everyone's hungry, you just got home from daycare, after careen from work, the community, Like you do not want to think about getting food on the table at that point, which is when you have to do it, and so I think this is a real pain point for a lot of working parents. Do you have memories of a family dinner growing up, Sarah, Yeah, we had the fairly traditional family dinner most of the time. My mother did actually go back to work when I was in middle or high school, but when I was younger than that, she stayed home. So it was the she'd prepared dinner for a couple hour or two hours, I don't know, I'll have to ask her. It seemed like a long time in the afternoon, and then my dad would come home from work around six thirty or seven or so, and we were usually starving by then because that was like late as kids, and we did sit down all together. But the funny thing is, what I remember about those dinners is not even though my mom actually deserves a lot of credit as an excellent cooke, she was and still is, but I don't really remember the food all that much, which I think is kind of telling because there's so much emphasis placed on like the perfect menu, and like people put a lot of pressure on themselves. But I remember sitting down, I remember a few favorite dishes, but mostly just kind of the experience. What about you. Yeah, I mean, this is gonna sound so sad, and it is so unfair to my parents because I know they did get dinner on the table together a lot of nights that my mom and my dad, you know, both cooked at various points, and I know my dad was responsible for getting us dinner for a while with My mom did tutoring growing up when I was growing up, and so that the hours for that are often like three to six o'clock or three to seven o'clock at night because kids need tutors after school. But what I honestly remember most, I mean best memories I have are like of going to McDonald's and getting the Monopoly game pieces and playing on the playground, Like god, I love McDonald's. And then at one point we started going to the mall food court. Like I don't know how often we did it. We probably didn't do it that often because my parents weren't that big on taking us out to eat, because you know, who does want to take kids out to eat? But you know, we'd go to the mall food court and I get like chicken kariaki at the Japanese stall at the mall food court and I thought that was just so awesome. So and it's so funny of all the meals your mom probably you know that your parents got on the table. It's the food court. Chicken karaiaki is what I like dinners, growing up on this image of being at the mall food court and having chicken terary on and yes, that is so unfair, and I know it is so unfair. And my mom in particular, I mean she cooked us with a lot of like I went through a vegetarian kicked for a while and she went ahead with it and like cooked a lot of vegetarian dishes and I was great and all that. But for some reason, I don't know the chicken karaaki kebabs at the mall food court, which I feel like, really that both of us like the theme there is like get food on the table, make it healthy. Do not put pressure on a million details unless that's fun for you, because your kids are probably gonna forget it anyway. Your kids are gonna have no memory of like the vast majority of this. And I feel like I've read some research on what children take away most from their child is sort of their feelings of whether it was a happy childhood or not, like whether they felt safe and loved and all that that you take away from childhood. A lot of other stuff it's just lost in the wash or else. You make different choices as adults, and that's kind of life. But that may be the one thing that that kids take with them, and so you want to sort of focus on it being fun and family and enjoying each other's company in whatever form that happens to take. But I think one of the reasons we had we had talked about doing this segment, we had both of us had read a post on a blog that is The Frugal Girl is the the blog. It's a great website, by the way, she her theme is cheerfully living on less and of the various like frugal bloggers out there, she is so non judgmental, which if anyone has read a lot of the frugal blogs out there, there are many more judgmental frugal people out there, and she has not that at all. But she's very into giving helpful hints. And so one of her readers had written in like, well, I work full time, you know, I commute, I come home. I want to get dinner on the table. What do I do, you know? And how do I not resort to take out every single night, which is of course the temptation because then it's made for you and you can get it on the way home and all that. And so they had a lot of really good the readers had. It was like one hundred and fifty comments, right, it was something ridiculous like that. Yeah, the comments were I mean, the post was great, but the comments were amazing. Yeah, And so I mean, there's there's a lot of good stuff, but a lot of it was about things like having rotations, right, and you do a rotation of sorts. We totally do a rotation you want to hear, So pretty much every Monday we have some combination of salmon, green beans, and some kind of carb like sweet potatoes, because I don't have to think, and that's like one day that's checked off. And because fish, like the shopping happens on Monday, so that's like just done, and that's so easy. And I mean, to be fair, we've talked about on the outsourcing. I actually do not cook these days, but if I did, I could throw that together in a very short amount of time, so I feel confident that would be a universal choice. Then we do something on Tuesday to Wednesday, so we are huge on leftovers, so our rotation loves leftovers. That usually has like chicken, like that's our sort of meat type thing. So I'll just pick something at a cooking light or real simple or something I saw on a blog. And then Thursday and Friday we've been doing like something vegetarian, like my kids love these like black bean burrito bowls. And then that's the entire week. And then on Saturday, a lot of times we either go out with the kids or we do take out with them, so like with a family, or we get pizza something like that. If we're going out and the kids are home, they're often eating eggs because that's like the perfect feed your kids date night meal. And then Sunday is actually probably where it varies the most because sometimes we're doing something social. Sometimes I cook something and maybe we'll get the ingredients on Saturday, and then it's sort of like doing that for fun, like it's not getting food on the table. That's the one meal that I might make something that I saw on a cool magazine to enjoy it because I do I think it is funk because I don't do it all week What do you look through to get recipes? And where are you finding them? Oh my gosh, so I it's funny. I gravitate towards well. First of all, for like the weekdays. I tend to like blogs that aren't necessarily food blogs where they're like a word like lag Live, who is a lawyer with three kids in Texas, and I know many of my readers read her. She's awesome. She'll often post a weekly meal plan and it just kind of gives me ideas. And then I like a blogger called Healthy Slice of Life, so you could, you know, look for both of those and they'll they'll show their whole meal rotation, so that gives me ideas. But then I also love magazines like Cooking LTE and Real Simple are my go tos. You love Real Simple too, right? Yeah? At both of those as well. Get Cooking Light And I had a banana bread that I was making for a long time that came out of the Cooking Light Real Simple. A couple, I don't know, it was a year or two ago. They ran a section that was of their most pinned recipes and that was a total gold mine, and I should have looked up which issue it was so we could tell people to go find the old one, like on you know, eBay or Amazon or something, but they probably have it online too, or you just go follow them on Pinterest you can search. But they had their most penned recipes, and there were a couple of those that were like awesome. I mean, there's a shrimp taco one, there was a chicken tiking masala one. They're just good stuff, like I enjoyed eating them. But yeah, I love the thing about your rotation because you only have to really plan three meals, three things and of the same every time, so I really only two things exactly simple. And the thing with the leftovers is this is a good way for people to plan it out too, Like just plan to make more than you're actually going to eat, because then you can have a second dinner made out of it. It It doesn't have to be the exact same thing, Like I mean, if you made hamburgers one night, you can take the leftover hamburgers and turn them into taco meat or turn them into you know, the meat that would go in sauce for pasta or something. I mean you know, very simple like that, but use the same basic ingredient to have as leftovers. If so, if people get a little bit weird about having the same thing two nights in a row, which I wouldn't but some people do, then that can be a way around that. But you know, people are suggesting things on this blog like, you know, taco Tuesday, pizza Friday, sandwich night, breakfast for dinner, night, pasta night. Right there, that's like five nights. That's all you need, and that can go. Really, I mean, breakfast for dinner, that's what you guys do when the kids when you're going, oh kid friendly, so kid friendly. I mean, who doesn't love like eggs and waffles exactly, And it can put all the food groups in there like no problem problem. I think one thing that both of us sort of had a bit of a mixed feeling about, though, is the idea of too much cooking ahead of time. I know that some people are really into the idea of freezer meals. Is that something you have ever tried. I think the only time I ever put anything in the freezer was when I was pregnant with Annabelle, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna make a bunch of stuff in the freezer, and maybe that was the right time to do it because I had no kids at the time. But no, I'm not super I'm not a big freezer meal person. That said, I think that it can be great if you're making something like in bulk, like if you're making enchiladas on a Sunday, but you just make three pans and two of them go in the freezer, then I do think that could be kind of time saving, but I've never gotten into it personally that could save you time. I think what people, some people who really get into the start doing is making meals that they aren't actually eating at that point ahead of time, like what you're describing for stocking up for when the baby comes, only they do this for their normal life. What I've seen with this on people's timelines is that it saved It doesn't save you time. You're gonna wind up maybe eating better during the week in terms of more elaborate meals than you might have otherwise, but it doesn't save you time, and in fact, it costs you time because you have that weekend time that is devoted to cooking that could have been leisure time or could have been playing with kid time or could have been whatever time. And then people who do this also still then add stuff to it when they pull those meals out of the freezer. So like say they did make that pan of enchiladas that's in the freezer, they pull it out and then they're like, oh, well, let me make a side Mexican salad to go with it, and I'll get some beans to go on the side. It's like, so you're still in the kitchen cooking and you're still making that it's still taking you that time to heat it up, and you're making the side dishes during that time. Now, obviously if you were just cooking that night, you wouldn't have made that pan of enchiladas because it took more than half an hour to make. But you could have made a different dinner in thirty minutes or less. I mean, you make a dinner in fifteen minutes. So like that salmon you're talking about, a piece of salmon cooks in like fifteen twenty minutes. Nothing. Yeah, I mean, I would say better to focus on if you are going to cook a bulk and freeze it, that's fine. Don't cook anything that you're not making an eating right then and then well and also I think, well you kind of said this, but like really heating something up from frozen properly because I think it turns out better in the oven than the microwave. Oh yeah, it takes forever if you're coming home from work, unless you have like an early day and you can throw it in the oven for like two hours. Because if it's a frozen block, you're kind of in trouble. No, it definitely would have had night put it in the fridge the night before. Oh got it. See this is I don't This is what I don't do. Like, Okay, so you're sawing it and you get home and you set the heat it up. Okay, that's more reasonable. I mean you have to preheat the oven, like you stick it in. It's it's cooking, you know, for twenty thirty minutes. Like you're not saving time. It's still taking you forty five minutes after you get home, you it's dinner on the table, and maybe if you're home earlier than everyone else, that's fine. And yeah, you're eating better than you would have because you got this plate of enchiladas that took you an hour to make on Sunday. But you haven't saved time, you haven't helped yourself in that uys, So like better to have simple like the omelet for dinner, or the piece of salmon with green beans or you know what else is? What else is really quick? I'm drawing a blanket, any kind of sandwich or wrap, any kind of if you like, have the component. So I think like pre doing the components, Like I have seen people on a weekend while they're just hanging out, like slow cook a bunch of rice or some beans. Then you can just kind of like turn that into a million different things pretty mindlessly. Salad with some beans and rotissary chicken you bought at the grocery store, throwing some tomatoes, add some chips, squawk from a container. Done. Yeah, supermarket prepared foods are great that way. I mean, like you know, buy a rotisserie chicken or something and then you have that in your fridge for the week, and so that's really easy. Or some you know, there's lots of veggies that steam in the bag now in the microwave. That's a mindless side. That's incredibly healthy. But I think the key thing what people have is they get this like mental fatigue. It's not even so much like the idea of cookies that you come home, you're tired from work, you don't want to decide, and you don't want to execute on it. That's why people wind up picking up takeout or stopping it. Well, and for that we were remember we were talking about those meal like not a subscription box, which neither of us well, we can get to that, but like a like a meal planning meal prep service, because they're pretty inexpensive and usually some of them require a little bit of prep on the weekends. But it does take that kind of mental piece out of here. Like I'm thinking about services like Fresh twenty or prep Diish, neither richer episode sponsors, by the way, but where you get a list and then the meals and then you just don't have to think about it. My problem is I always seem to be like, well, but my kids don't like that, and I might not feel like that that night. But it does kind of take the mental piece out of things a little, and some of them, really I think it's the planning I had that is really helpful, Like in a time when you do have energy to play on the week and then you know, go grocery Monday morning, always I do. I do well. Again, I only have to pick two things, so sometimes I've already like seen them during the week and I ripped them out, and I like have a little area next to my magazines where I put like recipes that I want to do, or I go to like perennial favorites from some of my favorite cookbooks. And then Monday morning is always when I put the list together, and like I'm talking at like, you know, six in the morning, because that's when I do a lot of my Like I don't know, I have that the part of my brain that does planning is really works well at that time and not at other times. So I do my meal planning then too, and make a grocery list. And you know, as we've talked about, I don't do my own shopping anymore. If we did not have the situation we had, I probably might consider something and I still didn't want to go to the store. I might consider like a grocery delivery on a Sunday, or just going early myself in a Sunday because grocery store is early are super empty and yeah, much more satisfying to go to battling the crowds at Wegman's on Saturdays just school like eight am. It's amazing, It's like sterile. I love it so at one point. Un Fortunately I'm not doing a whole lot of my grocery shopping anymore either now. But when I was, and I have my two year old was waking up at like five am. We did, in fact go to Wegmans sometimes at five thirty am. Oh perfect, no, And you can get done really quick. There's like nobody in your way, and you don't care if your kid's really running around because there's no one to run into. That's impressive time. And I literally had a woman yell at me because she thought I was standing between her and the milk she was trying to grab. I was like, there's a great like YouTube video about the Whole Foods parking lot that went viral a couple of years ago, but I swear it's like real, it's so funny. I got the aggression in the Whole Foods parking lot by people. Would yes, exactly exactly, it's so funny. Yeah, so I would. I would probably you know, do that meal planning on weekends. You know, again full disclosure here. I decided about a year and a half ago that I really did not want to think about, you know, feeding my kids and myself after work. My husband is often gone traveling, so he was often not part of this, and I really didn't feel like cooking, and so that is one of the things that I outsourced now that our nanny does a lot of the food prepp and that's absolutely a great option if you have a childcare provider that doesn't have stuff to do during the school day, or if your kids are older and you know they're not running around and trying to cook with a baby. At the same time, I actually really enjoy I let it, you know, even though I like to be efficient about it. I like that control and I like doing that little meal planning ritual. So I have no no plans to outsource that, but as we talked about, we do outsource the actual cooking and shopping for the food. So it's kind of fun. It's kind of the experience of being sort of like a nineteen fifties man. So I think of as there's something there's dinner. That's not really how it goes because the hours between four and six she and I are trading off driving the kids around to various places. But it is kind of nice to if I've gone to pick up a kid who's out summer, I'm picking up two of the kids at their activities and come home and then dinner's on the table. It's like I don't have to also be putting dinner on the table. In addition to the car fifties, Laura, I mean, there are many many, probably many more men than women right now that still enjoy that lifestyle. It just happens to be their wife doing it. The fact that we've taken jobs that have meant that we're not necessarily the ones doing it. There really should not be any negativity associated with No, I don't, and I really appreciate it. I I'm always very thankful for the meals and make a point of complimenting them. They're very good. But that's yeah, when I think about, like, you know, if I were cooking for people, and obviously she's being paid to do it, so that's sort of whatever, but I was not, and I was feeling like I wasn't getting a whole lot of the happiness for my children about it, and I kind of had enough. So that's one of the things I managed to get off my plate in the last year, and it's been great, freed up a lot of mental ENERGYCE we'll throw that out there as a possible option for people too. But yeah, neither you or I have done those meal delivery kits or yeah I don't. It looks very inefficient. Actually, it's like and they talk about you know, thirty to forty five minutes and like everything's individually wrapped, and it's like all that packaging and then it only makes one night of dinner. Maybe if there was one that I don't know, turned into like two dinners and one lunch, I might maybe be interested. But no, I think if I was gonna, like when the baby's born and my parents, well, my parents are actually gonna visit, but during my nanny being on vacation, if my mom didn't feel like cooking, I might think about doing like a you know, we actually did this with Anabelts when she was a baby. We found a restaurant that had this really cool family dinners thing and it was not that expensive where they just cooked all your dinners for a week and you picked them up and you beat them up, and it really was not that expensive. And it was really good food and for like a special kind of time when we didn't have the help and things were crazy because I had a new baby. It was perfect. So I'd be more likely to just do that then do like a meal box. Yeah, I assume the meal boxes is kind of like a fun couple date night sort of things. So if you're you know, newlyweds or like a couple that's living together and wanting to play house, I guess together, you're like, oh, we can cook this, and but yeah, one of the selling points of some of these services is like there's less food waste because it's just you know, the mout for that dinner. Like, but we don't have food waste at our house because we eat the leftover since it makes lunch for me your dinner and then lunch ad nauseum, and I always in my left un I don't. I don't understand this concept of food waste. You know, maybe maybe other peop people don't like to eat leftovers. That all really don't. I mean, that must make it a lot harder. I really I embrace monotony to some extent, and I love, you know, the fact that nobody has to cook, including the Nanny, including me on at least two days a week, if not more. I think it's great, and the food is still nutritious and good and tasted just as good as to do the night before to me anyway. Yeah, and it was just where we're gonna talk real briefly about our favorite cookbooks, because I know we mentioned the magazines we get recipes from. Do you have any cookbook series? Yeah, I have two favorites actually right now. One is called Run Fast, Eat Slow, and it's actually it's co authored by a chef and then also Slane Flanagan, who is a Olympic runner extraordinaire. And you know, at first I was like, oh, it's kind of gimmicky like the Olympic, but actually this book is filled with fantastic recipes. And I know multiple people who also are super into this book. I mean, like we eat the shrimp tacos with mango and avocado salsa, like all the time, we make their chili, we make their muffins. It's great. So I highly recommend that. And then Melissa Clark is a food writer for New York Times, and she had a cookbook called Dinner that came out maybe about a year ago, and we've been making a bunch of stuff from there that tends to be like something I'll peruse that on a Sunday and then make Sunday dinner kind of for fun every once in a while. I'm not gonna lie, it's not happening that often these days, but I think it will this Sunday. So that's good. That's good. Yeah, what about you. Well, I went through this like joy of cooking phase. So when I was first out on my own after college, I was living in a house with four other girls, and we you know, I would cook my dinners many nights, and I would sometimes cook something big for myself on the weekend and then have it for lunch all through the week. I'd bring my lunch to my job because I was making nothing and so I was not even gonna buy lunch at work. That was like gonna be a hue waste of money. But anyway, I cooked some of these recipes and the joy of cooking, and I remember in particular this wild rice and mushroom and chicken and spinach and walnut casserole, and it was great, Like, yeah, it was awesome, And I made a huge vat of it. And then I could, you know, heat it up in the microwave at lunch or yes, the one pot of lunch trick. I did that, see a lot, the one pot lunch. And so all I had to do was put it in a little temperware and bring it with me to work, and that was lunch for the entire week. And so that I assume saved me some quantity of time and cash in that sense. So I really got into it. I stained that page and the joy of cooking. And then unfortunately I haven't really done that much from the joy of cooking since, because I guess I had more time than or something. Now, when I am cooking, I really like to look at what those time estimates are. You know that all those magazines now have time estimates on recipes, and sometimes they're accurate, sometimes they're accurate. But what I have, funny, from a sort of sociological historical person, I collect old magazines. I collect like old red books, old good housekeepings, old Ladies home journals from the nineteen fifties and stuff. They didn't have those time estimates then, yeah, because everyone's time was limitless or better, you didn't need it. If you didn't need to know you were going to cook it or you're not going to cook it, But the time was was non relevant to the whole situation. Very interesting. Yeah, all right, well so that's that's meal planning. Let's let's go to our love of the week. What's what's yours this week? Yeah? I thought we better stay in our foody theme. My love of the week is an Espresso. So you know, they're those cute little coffee pods and the sleek looking machines, and we actually have a store near us so we can get the pods. Sometimes I order them online, sometimes we buy them, and it's just such delicious coffee. I'm not a fan of other pods, but then espresso is addictive and so easy. And I was feeling kind of guilty about this love because they, you know, are not necessarily the best for the environment, and they're aluminum pods. But I do find out in my research for this episode that they're recyclable, so now I can feel less bad because we can actually just drop it off at the store, which happens to be right near us. But I think they also have an option to ship as well. What about yours? So I guess my food related love of the week is putting heavy cream in my coffee in the morning. You know, I always like putting milk in my coffee, and then a couple of years ago, I realized it's better with real cream, and so in the morning I like to have just a dash of real cream and the coffee so much better like it. Especially when I was being woken up by five am every morning, I gotta say, four forty five am is no time for skim milk. That's when you really need to have the real stuff. I drink my coffee black, so I don't know, but it does sound kind of delicious. It is, And I don't put sugar in my coffee. I don't put sugar heavy cream, just heavy cream, and it's awesome. And then our question of the week, so we were getting some professional things, especially coming through my blog that a lot of people are going through the whole end of the year review process. Do you guys do this at your We do, but it's actually done like at the end of our fiscal years, so ours happens in like May and June instead of the end of the year. So interestingly, a lot of companies are doing this right now. So people are gearing up for this, and this episode's going to air in November, so we're getting even closer to it when that's coming up. But people say, well, okay, we know that what happens in the last month or two before the review winds up being in people's heads when they go into the review, which is totally unfair because there was a whole year, but people remember the last two months, So what should we do to have a really awesome review? Like, what can we do in that last month or so to make sure that this is noticed, especially if somebody is like angling for a raise or a promotion. I'm so curious to hear your answers because they're probably more widely appicle. But but but I think what you just said is actually really important, which is that before my review. So I went in a little nervous this year because I had gone to part time and I sort of wanted to make sure they still knew I was all in and a valued employee. I sort of wrote down a list of like, this is what I did this year, bam bam, bam bam, so that it wasn't going to be necessarily a focus on what happened in the last few weeks or just a gestalled idea, Oh, what Sarah did this year was go to eighty percent time great, But instead I actually wrote out and I do keep track by updating my CV, so it's easy for me to kind of figure out, you know, what presentations I gave or new groups I led, or stuff like that. So I think that actually going in with at least if that's at our institution, we have this sort of self evail form, and I think a lot of places have moved towards that, so reminding them of what you did and why you're valuable. Yeah, I keep notes on that through the year. I mean, because this is the problem, Like if you haven't been thinking about it either, well, you know, we're the best judge of ourselves, and other people probably pay a lot less attention to us than we think they do. And so you know, something awesome you did in February is just you know, not on people's radar screens when you're thinking about this in November December. So make sure through the year you are keeping notes on every awesome thing you've done. And it might help to at this point to jog your memory to like go pass through past calendar entries, you know, look at any notes you've taken, even stuff like expense reports that you have, but any sort of data you have of the year, to go through it and jog your memory of like, well, what were my big wins, you know, and to make sure that it's not it's sort of hard to you know, praise ourselves in that way, but putting it in a positive light, especially if you're trying to get other people to recognize it. But I think also with this it helps to be thinking about even the next year. I mean, it is kind of late going into this year to score a really big win in the next month, though, if you can go for it, I mean, that's a good reason to hunker down and make it happen. But be thinking about, well, we're going to have this review again next year. Most likely you'll have to go through this again next year, or even if not at your current employer, it's some other employer. And so what would you like to be saying at next year's review, Like what would make it seem like a really awesome review if you were saying things this year, what would you want to be saying? And and so next year, what would you like to be saying, and then once you have that list, you can start actually making it happen in the next year and know what you're working toward. And to some extent, reminding a reviewer of what you have on the docket is also a reminder that you're valuable, because it's like, oh, well, that won't happen unless we have this very valuable employee with the initiative to do it. But you still can probably do stuff in the next few weeks. I mean if you just spend a few minutes thinking about it. And I mean it's so easy not to think ahead and not to plan and strategize because we always get so busy. But if you just spend thirty minutes and recognize that this is one of the best investments of your time you can make, because because this is where people's raises and promotions come out of as decisions made in these meetings, whatever your performance review rating or whatever is on this is what is going to be the evidence then used in that decision. And so spending like an hour or two thinking through what would I like to say? Is there something I can do to shore that up in the next couple of weeks? I mean, is there somebody I've worked with who I could get, you know, testimonials from to bring in as evidence. You know, people love things like that. It's like book blurbs or something like that. Let's talk about how wonderful this person is as wonderful things you did, but you know, bringing that in as evidence or anything that you can turn into numbers. Numbers are also good. So not just like oh, I, you know, worked really hard. We'd be like, well, we you know, contacted all these old clients and managed to bring three of them back into our firm. I mean, that's the kind of numbers people like to see silk in medicine, they already have your numbers. They already have your numbers, stay to mind, your productivity, your ratings and everything. So I don't know that there's as much control that can be sort of done at the end of the day there. So for us, it's more just about like highlighting, like what success is outside if necessarily those numbers that they might not they probably wouldn't think about or know about. But I agree the preparation is really important because it's a very high stakes kind of a kind of a thing. It's a crucial conversation. Well, This has been episode fourteen, our Meal Plan Extravaganza. We've been talking about getting food on the table when you're tired after work all day and various ways to make that easier and less painful for everyone involved. So we'll be back next week with more of Best of Both Worlds. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the Best of Both World's podcast. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.