I plan my meals every week.
It saves me time and money.
It helps me visualize when I’ll need extra help, or when to scale back or when to pull out the fancy forks.(Just kidding, I don’t have any fancy forks. Do you?)
It keeps me from wasting food.
It takes less than 15 minutes a week.
So, what are you having for supper tomorrow?
How a Meal Plan Comes Together
There’s a logic to my meal planning, teased out through years of the effort.
Our meal plans are, on average, followed 60% of the time. Some weeks (especially the broke ones), it’s 100%. Some weeks (the busy ones) it’s 25%. All averaged out, 60% followability.
And like I says, 60% is better than 0%.
I’ll take it.
Here I’ll go through the whyfores of how I plan my meals in the hopes that it might save you a little money, time or effort yourself. So, what are you having for dinner tonight?
- The food-we-have list
- The calendar.
First. The food-we-have list.
Usually early Saturday morning, I creep downstairs and make a really messy list of all the ingredients that we need to use up. Man, it’s ugly: real back of the envelope, back of a crumpled piece of construction paper kind of list.
On this list, I take note of rotisserie chicken carcasses, wilty green onions and potatoes that might just be starting to sprout. (Those foods you really don’t want to toss quite yet.)
Then, I add pantry staples. Sometimes, I have an errant 1/2 cup of corn meal that’s just bugging me. Sometimes, I need to use up one of the six giant cans of Roma tomatoes that are taking up too much room. Sometimes, I become obsessed with using up a can of evaporated milk and I take it from there.
It’s the ugliest little list you ever did see. I scratch things off, I circle and draw connecting lines. I look at what leftovers we have and what leftovers we will have so that we can minimize food waste and maximize our prep time.
Second. The calendar.
Once I have that, I look at my calendar. Just like you, between social events and an intense work schedule, we’re pretty booked. Thinking about our week ahead of time helps prepare us for the events ahead — and sets up a sense of happy anticipation. When I look at my schedule as it relates to food I look forward to my week instead of dreading it.
On the days I work in San Francisco, I don’t get home until 8:00 pm. This means that dinner for James and the girls needs to be ready to go without me. James is a great preparer of food, but as you know, with two toddlers, there’s just not a lot of time. So we plan meals that can either be made in the slow cooker or meals that are ready to go.
This week, I work in the city Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. I’m spending the night on Wednesday, so I know that on Thursday, James is going to be beat.
Knowing this helps me work around the calendar with a combination of convenience, pre-prep and the freezer.
Sunday
Sunday is my day to make all of the foods — Sunday dinner is a priority for our family, so we usually have some sort of time and/or intensive meal. On top of the baked potatoes, greens and steak, I made chicken soup, the meat sauce for the spaghetti, and cooked the broccoli. I also packed the lunches for the next day and set up the coffee. (Sunday from 3-6pm is quite a busy time in the kitchen, I’ll tell you what.)
Monday
For dinner on Monday, all James needed to do was boil some pasta and heat up the sauce, insto-dinner-presto! I rolled in at eight and made a late night salad after the girls were settled.
Tuesday
Since I’m home Tuesday, when I’m preparing the night’s dinner, I’ll brown the short ribs and cut all the veggies and add them to a slow cooker bag. I put the meat and veggies in a slow cooker baggie in the fridge.
I’ll also make the mashed potatoes for Wednesday (mostly). I’ll cook and rice the potatoes — and stir the butter through. I’ll leave stirring the milk through for James on Wednesday.
Wednesday
On Wednesday morning, James adds the short rib mixture to the slow cooker before heading to work. Wednesday night, he’ll heat up the mashed potatoes, stirring through the milk and the short ribs will be ready already! Thank you slow cooker!
Thursday
For James and the girls, Thursday will be a fun convenience food night because sometimes, you need to eat foods named poppers. GO AMERICA!
Friday
Friday is for chicken soup and sandwiches — I made this chicken soup on Sunday. (We had a surplus of cooked chicken and some celery and carrots that were starting to wilt.) Sunday night I tucked it in the freezer when it was done. We’ll defrost and heat up the soup and make grilled cheese sandwiches and super salads.
Friday is the day most likely that we cave and order a pizza or pick up something — so I like to have Friday’s meal be easier than pizza ordering. Self hack!
Saturday
Saturdays are our funnest food days. I usually do my grocery shopping on Saturday, so I don’t need to plan my meal based on food I already have in the fridge. We’ll plan for make-your-own pizzas (also thwarting any Friday night pizza temptations) — I’ll have time to do the crust myself, and if I don’t, I can buy a crust. I’m easy like that.
And I have a sneaking suspicion you are too.
(Tomorrow, we’ll talk about shopping lists and strategies for meal planning.)
Any more questions about meal planning? Ask ’em in the comments!
I’ve always planned the weekly meals ahead, from when I first took over the family kitchen at age 15. I hate grocery shopping, and planning in advance helps me avoid the stores during the week. (Usually we have got a big trip or two on Saturday, and I go out for some fresh vegetables on Tuesday or Wednesday.) When we moved in together, the BF initially made fun of that habit, but by now I guess he even likes it, because it is way more relaxing this way.
Funny to see this post. I am a huge believer in meal planning to save time, money, waste and hassle. I was telling some friends about it last night, and they laughed and said if I had kids it would never work. Seems like families with kids would have even MORE reason to do meal planning, but hey, what do I know?
There is nothing more frustrating to me than starting to cook (especially after a long day at work) and finding out I am missing ingredients. Meal planning puts an end to that for me.
Like some of the other commenters, I also cook for 4 and we take leftovers – BAM. Lunch is packed. Saves time and a lot of money!
YES! The rage I feel when I am missing one ingredient used to make me give up on cooking all together. I meal-plan loosely just so that I know I have all the shit I need for the week.
my husband and i have started planning our meals, but realize that we just can’t stick to a rigid plan. you just never know how much energy you will have for dinner or what you are in the mood to eat. so, what we do instead is decide, ‘okay, these are the seven meals for the week’ and decide each day (or the day before, or 2 minutes before we want to eat) what we will have from the list. it helps that ‘don’t know what to have for dinner-let’s just go out’ problem, and helps with grocery planning. we will for instance get broccoli for soup one night and with pasta another.
When I cook something in the slowcooker or oven baked I usually make a huge batch and then freeze it into meal portions.
My meal plan is on a weekly tear off pad so as I add 4 portions of chilli to the freezer I write chilli on the meal planner, 1 day for the next 4 weeks, makes it even easier to know what meals I have in the freezer ready to go
My husband and I do this too, although we don’t always take stock of what we have because we’re pretty good about eating leftovers and don’t buy cans of stuff we don’t need. It helps us to plan in leftover days so everything gets eaten quickly. For a while it helped us to plan by making Monday pasta night, Wednesday soup night, etc. But now we mix it up more. We try to introduce only one new recipe at a time so that we’re not overwhelmed or have too many possibly crappy dinners in a row. Sometimes if we know we’re going to have to buy a lot of something, like a bunch of celery, for a soup but aren’t going to use it all, we’ll pick other meals that use that same ingredient so it gets used up before it goes bad. Yay meal planning!
A big thing for me is to remind myself that they are not all going to be fancy 4-star dinners, sometimes dinner can be a piece of chicken, and some veggies thrown over rice. So usually on the weekend and the beginning of the week, the hubby and I cook a few big meals, and by the end of the week we eat leftovers.
The kids like it because they get to pick from the little bits of meals and leftover produce we had during the week. “I want an apple, mashed potatoes and a hot dog” And we like it because it empties the fridge for the next week.
this is an old post, but hey! i was just priding myself on sticking out meal planning for 4 months so i thought i’d pitch in on what works for us.
let me begin by saying, my boyfriend and i have tried and failed at meal planning SO many times in the past. somehow we stumbled on something that actually works for us.
we have a dry-erase board that we keep our weekly meal plan written on one side and the grocery list on the other. we update the grocery list as needed when we run out of staples (peanut butter, eggs, oatmeal) and then on saturday or sunday we make the plan for the week.
first i take stock of what we have in the house that we should use up. then, we look in the weekly circular for our two closest grocery stores and see if they have any deals we can’t pass up. after looking at the week to see if there’s anything on the schedule we need to know (he is working late one day, etc) we decide which days need to be super easy nights and which ones can be a little more time intensive.
we try to use the same ingredients in multiple meals, that way it all gets used up in different ways without us getting bored.
luckily, we both are the kind of people who tend to go on food binges – so one week we’ll go asian heavy, the next will be potato heavy, one week’ll be all mexican accidentally. this is really convenient for eating seasonally, because we will be perfectly happy eating asparagus until asparagus is out of season!
this started out because i was sick and tired of throwing food away, and because we really needed to budget (loss of one income with the introduction of a new baby). using the same ingredients all week long is awesome because if on breakfast burrito day, we’re just not in the MOOD for breakfast burritos, we can just rearrange the ingredients into something new. or we can just switch days around if it ends up being easier to make pizza on monday and steak on tuesday.
our biggest budget downfall was that we would wait until the last minute to decide what’s for dinner, then have to go to the store to pick up some things for it, then come out of the store with a $60 bill when we only wanted an onion! now we have a rule that if it’s not on the list, we’re not buying it. we can add it to the list for the next time if we really want it.
having the plan definitely helps with prep (oh yea, we’re having rice & beans tomorrow, tonight i’ll actually remember to soak the beans instead of buying canned, & we’ll make enough rice for the stir-fry later in the week!). i eat leftovers every day for lunch & clean the fridge every friday so i can see what’s left in there. plus, the benefit is that now we no longer have 2 year old chickens in the freezer!
I’ve come back to these posts many time since they first went up. Just today I mapped out meals for the rest of the week! Now to figure out where to post so that I can easily see them when it comes time to cook. I’m so excited – it’s been bugging me that I haven’t had any control over my food for the week. Yay for finally having a plan! Thank you!!!