My Meal Planning Tips

This week is all about food and what it takes to get food on the table.  For me, grocery shopping is a minimum two day process with the first step in the process being MEAL PLANNING.

I'll be honest, I didn't really start taking meal planning to heart until I had my second child and my husband was deployed for a year.  All of a sudden, I had two little people to take care of, one of whom was very needy, and I myself couldn't just get by on goldfish and chicken nuggets for a year waiting for another set of adult hands to free me for a leisured dinner prep.  I realized and began to utilize the sacred naptime for dinner prep as well as discovering a range of freezer cooking recipes.

The biggest part of planning is actually writing something down!  For me, I have found that the standard vertical monthly calendar from Printfree.com is absolutely perfect.  There is enough space to write in an entree as well as note any activities and it's a single sheet of paper which takes of little space and is easy to reference.  I think it's very important to annotate your family's activities and commitments on the meal plan because when filing in dinners you can quickly know that on Wednesday evenings you need a crockpot, scoop and serve or other quick meal so that you can eat as soon as you get home from sports practice.

Monthly calendars, a document protector and a magnetic clip make meal planning painless.

My secret weapon in meal planning calendars is that I keep them for one year (yep, a whole 12 months) in a document protector that is clipped to the side of my fridge.  That way, when November 2016 is coming around, I can pull out November 2015 and remember some of my seasonal favorites that might have been forgotten through the previous months of summer cooking.  At the bottom of the calendar I also might note recipes that interest me or that I remember from previous months so that I have them in a visual queue for the next time I'm planning meals.

There aren't really any right and wrong ways to meal plan.  For me, I like to write out at least 2 weeks worth of meals (we are fortunate to have a chest freezer and second refrigerator) so that I can really stock up when I take a trip to the grocery store.  I also schedule a vegetarian meal once per week as well as a meal that involves fish or seafood (a great meal to have the night before trash day so you don't have to worry about salmon skin or shrimp tails sitting around for too long).  Also, I try and update the  meal plan based on what we actually ate.  This helps me know that I still have a particular freezer meal available or that I didn't actually serve burgers twice in one week.  Finally, I have a mini-white board that is stuck to the front of the fridge where that week's menu is written.  This helps me immediately know what I'm serving so I can consider what prep work might need to be done as well as making sure I have meat thawed and ready to go for future meals.

What's for dinner? Look and see for yourself!

Come back tomorrow and I'll be discussing Grocery Store Strategies so that the necessary chore doesn't have to be a necessary evil!