Seasonal Meal Capsule

                I have no idea how my mom did her meal planning back in the day. I remember that she would write lists (meals and groceries needed for said meals) on the back of greeting card envelopes. She would tuck the cash to buy the groceries inside and head to the store to buy whatever we needed.

                Even though I grew up in the home of a great cook and took every conceivable semester of Home Ec, I entered adulthood with no real idea of how to plan for meals.

                Over the last 20 years (and more specifically over the last 13 since we were married) I have traveled down many meal planning paths. My entrance into hard-core planning came when I did the 21 Day Fix program and had to plan out every single little container of food I ate throughout the day. Ever since then, I’ve been diligent about planning breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes snacks too.

                I’ve struggled lately to find something that works well for us from a staying-healthy perspective while also working for our busy and sometimes unpredictable schedule.

                One day, as I scrolled Pinterest, I encountered an article about a year-long meal capsule. Say what???

                The idea is to curate a collection of recipes that you repeat on whatever schedule works for you. I think the article I read recommended having recipes you repeat every six or so weeks.

                I decided to go a bit of a different direction with mine, and I am loving it so far.

                I am working to create a seasonal meal capsule. I chose this after reading about the value of eating foods in their intended seasons. It makes sense – especially in the summer, when we have a garden and all manner of fresh veggies at our disposal.

                I decided that for our capsule, I’ll create a list for winter (December/January/February), spring (March/April/May), summer (June/Juluy/August), and fall (September/October/November).

                Within each of those seasons, I’ll create a theme for each day of the week and try to find four or five recipes for each of those themes. Then I will rotate those meals with the intent to eat each one roughly three times that season. Then I will tuck it away until the next season. Hopefully this will allow us to eat our favorites a handful of times each year but also give us some great variety.

                The meals will be for dinner. Since I cook for just the two of us, we should have enough leftovers to fill our lunchboxes each day. For breakfast and snacks, we’ll just move ahead with the staples of things we love and eat regularly.

                I started this project in October, so we didn’t get through everything on the fall capsule, but here are the themes I have for fall:

Monday: Slow Cooker Meals. Mondays are usually really busy work days for me, so I liked the idea of having something I can toss I the slow cooker that morning and enjoy when I return home that night. I frequently don’t get off work on Mondays in time to make dinner, so this felt like a good solution to that conundrum.

Tuesday: Tacos. This won’t be my theme for every season, but hearty taco-ish meals felt good for the fall. To give variety, I found recipes featuring different meat in tacos and even found one that was a Big Mac taco recipe, bringing in a whole different flavor.

Wednesday: Chili. Again, this felt like a good fall food, and I found many different flavors of chili. Some of these recipes were for the slow cooker and some for the stovetop, but regardless, this is a great option when we have church in the mix. I can let it cook all day or make it earlier in the day and let it simmer until we have time to eat it.

Thursday: Pasta. To be fair, for the most part we eat heart of palm or chickpea pasta, but it’s still a good comfort food. We are both frequently worn out by Thursdays, so a comfort meal is in order!

Friday: Soup. I pulled in recipes other than chili for this one. Some of them were for the slow cooker and others were for the stovetop, so I have some variety to mix up my schedule.

Saturday: Date. We often have a date or small group or plans with friends on Saturday, so I wrote this in as a non-cooking day. If we go out on a different day of the week, I just move that day’s menu plan to Saturday instead.

Sunday: Something New or an Old Favorite. I try so, so hard to protect our Sundays after church, so if that works, I have the evening at home to cook something new I’ve found online or something fun we’ve not had for a while.

                This plan has worked well for us this fall, and come the end of this month, I’ll show you some of the winners we found. I’m excited to see how it goes this winter. I’m still building my plan for that quarter!