Meal Planning + My Favorite Go-To Meals
Y’all know I love to be a color-coded/hyper-organized one. It always feels good to feel organized and meal planning is by far one of the best ways to help my week run more smoothly. I don’t always do it but goodness, when I do it helps me immensely. With kiddos starting back up with full-time (in person) school I feel like everything runs muuuuch more smoothly if certain things are taken off my plate. Enter meal planning. It drives me bonkers hitting 4:30 pm and not knowing what’s for dinner. I can definitely wing it (and I do keep some frozen meals around just in case) but it makes everything feel much easier when this part is handled and I’m prepared.
Here’s how I roll with meal planning. I start with a master list of meals that my people love. I started by simply pulling out a sheet of paper and adding meals that popped into my head. It’s kinda like how we all wear the same ten outfits. We could have a closet full of looks but mostly we grab our staples. Meals are often the same way. So, I taped the list up on a kitchen cabinet and continued to add to it as a new one popped into my mind. When I had time I also pulled out my binder of recipes/cookbooks/saved iPhone recipes and reminded myself of favorites for those as well.
In the end, my Master List has 32 meals. I'll share a bit of my list (with a few recipe links) here to give you an idea of what I'm talking about in case you're ready to start compiling your own:
Zesty Cobb Salad
Green Chile Enchiladas
Steak (variety of types)
Pizza Night!
Honey Dijon Salmon
Chicken Fajitas
Roast Chicken
Crispy Mexican Flautas
Carnitas
Breakfast for Dinner
Creamy Chicken Alfredo
Buffalo Wings
(Most everything I make I tweak a bit to make them dairy-free, gluten-free, and refined sugar-free but these recipes have been some recent faves.)
Get creative! Even if you're picky, you want to have almost a month's worth of meals on your list. Think hard. Grilled cheese and tomato soup can count as dinner! Write it down. I sometimes do breakfast for dinner so I wrote that down! No matter how silly you feel to admit that it's part of your repertoire, it's in there. So write it down. One of mine is called "leftovers" because undoubtedly there is always a night of that!
The next step is deciding how to create your calendar. I’m a pen-to-paper kinda gal and I love that people in the house can see it without having to ask me so it lives on a calendar. In years past, I've tried many styles. Cute printed ones, handmade, just a list that corresponded with the days of the month. At this stage of my life I do one week at a time but when my kids were young it felt like so much work to leave the house I would do a month at a time! I would make the grocery lists and shop for two weeks worth of groceries to prepare and maybe just produce in between (we lived much farther from a market back then and three babies was a lot of work to grocery shop with).
The last thing I always consider when making my lists is the existing calendar of events. I would circle back with it to know some days we might be out with family, at the theater for Ava, maybe a holiday was coming, etc. I also ALWAYS do pizza movie night on Fridays. That way one meal a week is forever planned and I don’t have to plan anything!
Now the planning part. I literally just start dropping meals into the calendar from the list. It’s that easy. While I write the meal down I also keep a second piece of paper or use my grocery app (I use the Amazon Alexa shopping feature - that way people can add to the list by just calling it out to Alexa at home). I got into a nice rhythm doing this and every couple of weeks I might add in a new recipe to try it out. The longer you do it the better you might get at thinking about ingredients so less goes to waste but overall any meal plan in my book makes for a more streamlined evening!
It always takes a minute to implement something new so even if it doesn't feel convenient or easy at first, don't give up! After a few months, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it!