When Planning Fails

I plan my meals each week. I sit down surrounded by recipes and lists of our favorites, catagorized by meats, and figure out the menu. I have a handy pad that lists all the days with boxes for each meal. When I was doing daycare I planned my breakfast, lunches and snacks too, but now I just do the dinner box, I use the extra boxes for notes and such. It comes with a perforated shopping list along the side so I can jot down what ingredients I will need for my meals. I plan and make my shopping list so that I know I have everything I need, and I have found that I throw a lot less away because I use it all. Most of the time what I have planned fits perfectly into the day, sometimes my day gets a little busy and I have to swap days and fix something a little easier because I have run out of time. then..there are the days when I start to fix what I had planned and I am halfway into it and realize that what I had chosen to make at the beginning of the week just isn't what I want anymore. I made the decision on Saturday what to make on Thursday, now I am invested in making it and I have to live with that decision. Even if it doesn't smell that appealing anymore, or look that appetizing. I've already started, I don't want to waste the ingredients or start something over because I have already invested so much time into what I have started. Do I throw it out and waste all the time and food? Do I continue and hope that somehow it becomes much more appealing and starts to look and smell better? Do I finish it and put it away and have a salad? What do I tell the family? I didn't like dinner tonight so I threw it out? What if they like it? I made the choice of what to fix, but maybe they don't want it either, or maybe they do. I am at a loss to know what to do when maybe what you chose to make for dinner just isn't exactly what you had in mind when you started it.