Eating well takes planning

The other afternoon a man pulled into our driveway, unsolicited, with a bunch of meat and chicken in the back of his refrigerated truck. It was a good thing, too, because the dinner hour was looming and we’d given nary a thought to what we were going to feed the kids.

It happens all too often at our house; our daughters are strung out and we’re caught completely flat-footed, as if cooking for them didn’t happen every day. Luckily, on this day, we were saved by a tri-tip from the back of the pickup. I threw it on the grill and — voilé! — there was dinner. Let’s hope it wasn’t horse. Montecito native Aviva Goldfarb (nee Shlensky) knows what to do if the meat truck doesn’t miraculously appear at the dinner hour in your driveway: She actually plans meals ahead of time. She has even turned that ability into a successful Internet business. Goldfarb is coming to Chaucer’s Books at 3 p.m. Sunday to tell people about it, her grass-roots advocacy for healthier school lunches, an electronic newsletter she writes once a week and, of course, to plug her new book, “The Six O’Clock Scramble Cookbook” (St. Martin’s Press). Goldfarb now lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., which is long-hour central for many professional parents. When she had her first child nine years ago, Goldfarb quickly realized that most cookbooks for families weren’t that good. Half the time the meals took a lot longer to prepare than the authors claimed and they just didn’t taste that good. Just as importantly, she realized that parents didn’t only need recipes, but also weekly plans. “What I’d come to realize through my own life and talking to other busy parents was that the hardest thing about dinner wasn’t so much about having a good recipe, but it was having a plan because 6 o’clock would roll around and you would realize that you didn’t have the ingredients for the tacos you had in mind,” she said recently by telephone from Maryland. What started as sharing weekly shopping lists and recipes with other moms in Chevy Chase, Md., grew into a weekly e-mail newsletter, begun in 2003, called the Six O’Clock Scramble (www.thescramble.com). It now has more than 2,000 subscribers and has been covered in O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times Magazine; The Washington Post food section and elsewhere. In the early 1980s, Goldfarb’s nutrition education began in a backdoor kind of way at Santa Barbara Junior High, where learning was usually reserved for autodidacts (I cast no aspersion on the school today). While she was always far more than a couple of cookies away from obesity, Goldfarb claims she made a run for it by lunching on two giant peanut butter cookies every day, bought from the school cafeteria with lunch money her parents gave her. “I started to get fat and I realized I couldn’t eat like that,” she said. Goldfarb began to eat better but her brush with chubbiness led to a lifelong passion for health and nutrition. Today, Goldfarb’s column, which is sort of a preamble to the week’s e-mailed shopping list and recipes, mixes health and environmental writing with the mundane. She once summed up research on which bag was better to request at supermarkets — paper or plastic (answer: it doesn’t matter as long as you reuse them) — to which she says she got an outpouring of grateful e-mails. “That (column) got more responses than any other column I’ve ever done…except crockpots,” she said, laughing.