Meal Planning 101
You can plan a few days at a time, or focus on a week at a time, you choose what works best for your family. With two teenagers, an almost teenager and a ten-year old, I have found that it is pointless to try to plan my meals without my activities calendar in front of me.
When you know what nights you won’t have much time to cook, and people have to be somewhere by 7:00, those are the nights you plan a crock pot meal, sandwiches, or leftovers; or something frozen that you pop in the microwave. The latter being a last resort because those are usually the least healthy options. Throw extra into the crockpot, and you can have a meal built on the leftovers later in the week. For example, some kind of chicken dish can be used to fill tortillas another night depending on the seasonings used.
The next step is to create your grocery list. You can use mine or create one of your own. I suggest you group your groceries by department so that they are easy to shop for once you reach the store. SAVE THIS LIST. After several weeks of planning and shopping, you’ll notice certain things consistently show up on your shopping list. This is when you can make your own master list. Put those things on the master list, with your items grouped by department, and leave a few extra spaces for the less usual ingredients. Make copies of it and keep one handy on a counter or fridge door. When you run out of a standard item, or are getting close, make a note on your master list. You’ll be that much more ahead when you do your next planning session.
A few years back, I was taking a few college courses. One was an evening course, and the other two were online. I knew running my household would be even harder once we got into the thick of things. I planned my meals six weeks out. It was wonderful. Each week, there were meals I never got to, so I just bumped them down to one of the empty weeks on the calendar, made my shopping list and went shopping.
Another way to handle meal planning is to make a few weekly menus and just rotate through those. I love this idea, but I found I spend too much time refining the menus so they flowed well together without too many repeats, there was sufficient variety of theme, etc. When each week is actually quite different on the calendar, this system never really quite worked for me. I’ll have my sample plans available in a subsequent post.
