Meal Planning Made Easy

Meal planning used to be my nemesis. It took time and brain capacity that I just didn’t have. Every week I would sit down to plan the meals for the following week and every week I would wing it. Sometimes I would make it to the store and sometimes I wouldn’t. We ended up rarely eating vegetables (because I never knew what to buy or they would rot in the fridge before we would get to them), or we would eat out  (which happened more than I’d like to admit and definitely more than I could afford), or I would just keep cooking the same 4-5 meals every single week because they were easy and didn’t require much thought.

A few years ago my kids revolted. They sat me down and told me they were sick and tired of eating the same things and demanded (well, maybe they didn’t make demands but it sure felt like it) that I get my shiz together because they wanted variety. I was also trying really hard to make healthy changes that required that I start getting serious about meal planning.

I tried a few different things. I tried to plan a week in advance. Every Sunday after church I would sit in my car and plan the meals then go shopping. That worked pretty well but I still kept getting stuck in the eating-the-same-five-meals-every-week rut.

I tried Pinterest to get ideas for variety but found that many of the meals either took too long to prepare, included ingredients that I didn’t keep on hand, were expensive or we just didn’t like them.

And then I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease. Which truly is not that big of a deal but when something stresses you out already and then a wrench gets thrown into the mix – it becomes a near impossible task. I was desperate for help. I wished that I could just pay someone else to do the thinking and the cooking for me but that was out of the budget. It came to the point where I hated meal planning, which also made me hate meal prep and then that overflowed to not enjoying my meals at all. Maybe it shouldn’t have been so stressful, but it was.

Meal time should be a time to talk with your kids, work together as a family, sit and talk and just enjoy each other but instead it was an exhausting event that I dreaded.

That’s when I found a couple of different ideas that I decided to combine into my own meal planning brilliance…and it worked! Meal planning suddenly became easy…and almost (not quite) enjoyable. It gave me control over my life, gave my kids a voice and gave me time back…don’t we all need more time?!

There are a couple of ways to do this type of meal planning. We do a combination of both.

• The “No Brainer”
  1. Write a list out of at least 30 meals
  2. Rotate the list, cooking one meal a day every day for a month
  3. Done
• The “I Need a Little More Say”
  1. Write a list out of at least 30 meals
  2. Choose – or have your kids choose – however many meals you’re going to need for the week from the list (we usually eat out twice a week, so we choose 5)
  3. Done

Seriously guys. Life changing. At first I thought there would be absolutely no way that I could come up with 30 meals. It seemed like so many – it did take me a few days but I did it. I chose meals that I knew I could cook, were inexpensive, and ones that I knew my kids would eat. My kids have really enjoyed having a voice in what we eat and enjoy cooking with me. Some weeks we still repeat some of the meals – HELLO! We have to have Taco Tuesday! But we’re flexible so sometimes we skip Taco Tuesday and try something new. This tool has given me the freedom to try new things…and our list of “30 Meals” is up to 43 meals now!

Click here for the list of our family’s meals (sorry no recipes – maybe someday I’ll get ambitious – I’ve considered adding a link for each meal that goes to the recipe and the grocery list but I’ve only gotten as far as making the list). Feel free to copy it, steal parts for ideas or ignore everything on it. I just wish when I sat down to write mine that I had a place to get ideas so I’m sharing mine with you.

So tell me, do you think this will be helpful? After you’ve tried it I would love to get some feedback from you to see if it was as life changing for you as it was for me!