A Life In Review

5 Stars- This is by far the best thing I have ever done. Now only if I could do it consistently… This saves me so much time during the week and saves our family money because we don’t end up ordering out every night or running expensive last minute shopping trips to the grocery store. When we plan out our meals it makes for a calmer wife who doesn’t have to constantly hear “what’s for dinner?” or “what do you want to eat tonight?”.

This is something that I started a couple months after we got married. When I lived with my parents (I lived with them and my younger sister until I got married), there were three other people in the house to help give ideas each night for dinner. Once I got married it was on me (I’m the picky eater so my husband didn’t like to give ideas). It sounds stupid, but dinner became something that I dreaded (yeah, I know, I’m dramatic sometimes). I would stress about it all day trying to be the perfect housewife who had dinner ready when her husband got home from work (or rather got out of bed since he worked 3^rd shift). That failed quickly and I knew that I needed a new system.

To start out, I wrote down all of the meals that I liked to eat along with all of the side dishes that I can stand. That way I had ideas to go off of already. You can do the same thing for your family. This is especially helpful if you have kids or live with a picky eater. This list is not an end all be all, it’s just a starting point (in fact, we like to go on Pinterest and try out new recipes). I think the easiest way to explain my process for meal planning, is to list it out in steps. I plan out one month’s worth of meals at a time if possible (I do not shop for the whole month all at once).

Step 1: Consult the family calendar (if you don’t have one, then I’m not even sure how to help you at this point), and determine which meals you will have time to cook for and which meals need to be quick.

Step 2: Choose menu options for each day (write them in pencil so that you can alter at the end). Try to mix it up, sometimes though, if I have a certain meal during the first week of the month, I’ll repeat that at the end of the month (if you like eating the same foods each week, you can do that too).

Step 3: Go over your final list and make sure that you are happy with the meals that you chose. If you need more of a variety, mix it up, that’s why it’s in pencil.

Step 4: Go down the weeks, meal (dinner) by meal writing out what ingredients you NEED for that meal. If you find that something overlaps then obviously you don’t need to write it down again just mark how many of the item you need, for example, if I am having Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese as a side dish one night, and having it as a main dish with hotdogs another night, I will write “Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese x2” on my list.

Step 5: Decide how big of a shopping trip you want to do and shop for what you can in advance so that there are no side trips during the week.

I’m sure that I could have written that with less steps, but I wanted to make my process as understandable as possible. To be clear, this is not about meal prepping. I do not get these dinners ready at the beginning of the week and freeze them. This is just a plan for the week so that come dinner time you are not scrambling around while the kids (and husbands) are whining and begging to be fed.

One final tip (or something that you already know and I am just repeating), if you can, make a couple meals in bulk and freeze them. We try to pick one night every other week, to make a big meal that we can freeze and pull out later when we either don’t want to cook, or have limited time to eat.

Below you will find my meal planning outline, my “menu” choice list (that hasn’t been updated in almost a year), and a sample meal planning layout.