Meal planning, grocery shopping and cooking are three of my least favorite activities to partake in. Having a personal chef is a life long dream for me. Since I don’t see that happening any time soon and my current job position of “CEO of our home”, aka stay at home mom, holds the sole responsibility of completing these tasks for our family, I decided to create a simpler way.
One day while making a grocery list and meal plan for what felt like the millionth time, I had a light bulb moment. Why am I doing this same thing from scratch week after week? This shouldn’t be this difficult. Why don’t I just create a template, do it once and reuse the work I’ve already done to put this undesirable task on auto pilot. First thing I tackled was meal planning.
List of Meals
I started by sitting down and creating a list of all the meals that my family of four eats, making sure to get their input so I could include everyone’s favorite. I made sure to only include meals that are simple and easy to make, the majority not even requiring a recipe.
Once I had a list of meals, I printed a calendar for the month off the internet and filled it in. I had a loose formula to help me with this. This is what it looks like.
Sunday
On Sundays we have a big “Sunday Dinner” day (Anika loves it when I say that) and while cooking this meal I will prep as much as possible for the upcoming week.
Monday
We eat a meal that has been prepped the night before and I just have to put in the oven to warm up, like shepards pie. Or something I prepped the night before to cook in the crockpot.
Tuesday
I make a crockpot or instant pot meal using things that I have previously chopped or prepped on Sunday.
Wednesday
A super quick and easy meal, spaghetti for example. I have already cooked the ground beef so all I have to do now is warm it up with some jarred sauce, boil up some spaghetti and throw together a quick salad using pre washed and chopped veggies from Sunday.
Thursday
We eat leftovers. This helps with food waste by having a specific night of the week we tackle them. If we’ve happened to eat all the leftovers I keep some nuggets, fries and frozen veggies on hand to have instead. This is my three year olds favorite meal so he is always happy when this happens.
Friday
Pizza and movie night! We usually eat frozen pizza, but once a month we get takeout. Jamie will occasionally make a pizza,
Saturday
Jamie cooks. I usually plan for him something simple unless he decides he wants to try something new.
The Benefits
Minimized cooking and cleaning
I only cook four times a week now and three nights of the week that cooking is minimal. Also since I’m getting the bulk of the cooking done on one day the bulk of my cleaning is also happening in only one day. For someone who does not like cooking and was previously spending a lot of her time doing that, this is phenomenal for me.
Helps appease picky eating
One benefit of meal planning like this is we only have to eat any meal once a month. That way if there is something one of my children really doesn’t prefer, but another family members loves, I can remind that person that they only have to eat it once a month.
No thought required
Once I had done the work up front, which was honestly very minimal because it was something I had to do anyway, going forward there is very little effort on my part. I don’t have to deal with coming up with the meal plan again and again. It’s already done. I’m not starting from scratch anymore. I also don’t have to deal with the 5:00 PM, “what’s for dinner?”, dreaded question. It’s already on the menu.
