I’ve been having fun each month
sharing with you some of my routines and how I go about them. We’ve talked skin care, makeup, laundry, setting up a planner, and today we’ll talk about meal
plans and grocery lists!
My
meal planning habits have gone through several seasons, so today I’ll share
with you the way I do it currently! Who knows…in a year or so, it might look
different yet!
If
you’ve been reading here for a long time, you probably know that I’ve been a
fan of the Dashing Dish website for almost a decade, and I’m still a fan! But I’ve
also started using some other websites to help me make my plans, and my ultimate
goal is to create a master year-long meal plan that I can just recycle year
after year. (That might take a while.)
I’m
also in the middle of creating a physical recipe book for us that includes hard
copy versions of the recipes we love and use the most – tweaked to our own
liking. So today I’m going to show you little pieces and parts of each of these
aspects of my meal planning.
Part One: The Meal
Plan
We
don’t always grocery shop on the same day each week, so the day I meal plan also
varies. I try to choose a day when I have a free block of time (hour or two) to
sit and plan. I open a blank computer document and make a list that looks like
this:
Thursday, May 09, 2024
Breakfast:
Snack:
Lunch:
Snack:
Dinner:
Snack:
Friday, May 10, 2024
Breakfast:
Snack:
Lunch:
Snack:
Dinner:
Snack:
I
carry that pattern out for however many days I’m planning until I think we’ll
have time to shop again. It usually amounts to roughly a week, but sometimes it
goes a little longer. And yes, I do plan six full eating events every day. If
you’ve been reading here a long time, you also know that I’ve taken several
journeys of learning to have a healthy relationship with food – and on my most
recent adventure, I learned the importance of eating six times a day – roughly every
2-3 hours. I also learned the importance of eating some protein each of those
times.
The
first thing I do is go through and fill in any meals I know we are eating out
or at an event. If we are eating at an event where I need to contribute a dish,
I’ll put a note on that line that I need to think of something to take, and
then I come back to that later.
Next,
I open up the SkinnyTaste website
and use the free meal plans provided there each week. These. Are. Pure. Gold.
You can see her whole archive of FREE weekly meal plans here. She’s been doing it
for years. Isn’t this amazing? I love several things about her meal plans. She
offers a plan that gives you three meals a day, seven days a week, minus one
meal. She always builds in one eat-out meal per week. For the most part,
I really like what she creates. And her offerings are healthy. Most calorie
counts per day are on the lower end, so you have room to build in snacks and
still stay in a good calorie boundary per day. (While I realize not everyone counts
calories, it’s generally accepted that there’s value in staying in a good,
healthy boundary.)
So
I read over the meal plan for the week I’m in, read the recipes, and decide which
ones I want to implement and which ones I do not. I use probably 80% of her
recipes to build my plan for the week. I also try to be willing to try at least
one new thing each week. This week it’s chia pudding. In all transparency, it’s not my favorite, but I also don’t hate
it, and I’m proud of myself for trying it.
When
I choose the meals I want to use, I plug in the name of the recipe next to the
meal where I plan to make it. Then I add the link to the recipe so when it’s
time to cook, I can go right back to it. It looks like this:
Thursday, May 09,
2024
Breakfast: Tropical Chia Pudding Breakfast Bowl
If there are meals I don’t care for from that list, I move over to Dashing Dish and peruse her meal plans to see if I can find something I like better. The
Dashing Dish plans are not as robust as the SkinnyTaste ones. She doesn’t plan
every single meal or the weekends.
I build in my snacks from these two sites too, even though they don’t include them in meal plans. I try to organize my meals in such a way that I have heavy prep meals on days when I have the time to do the prep and the slow-cooker or easy meals on the busy days.
Part Two: The Grocery List
As I choose my meal plans, I also make a separate list below
my meal plans in my document, and that’s where I make my shopping list. I write
down anything I need to buy to make those meals, and when I’m all done, I check
the cabinets/refrigerator/freezer/pantry to see if I truly need to buy it. While
we don’t have room to stock a ton of extra food, I try to keep some things on
hand, so sometimes I can whittle down the list from what I have in surplus.
When I’m done with this process, I consult the little
list I keep in my desk drawer to fill in things we’ve run out of since the last
shopping trip. (Cat and dog food, Ryan’s oatmeal packets, pretzels and chips
for Ryan, etc.)
Another note: I do organize our grocery list according to
theme, so all the produce is in one spot, for example. This (theoretically)
helps with backtracking when we get to the store.
I keep my document up on my computer throughout the week
and click on the links to the recipes when I am ready to cook!
Part Three: Building a Recipe File
One last thing: I told you I’m working on building a
recipe file in hard copy format. Here is an example of one of the pages. I make
these in Canva and use photos I take of the food I make so it looks pretty! I’m
a little behind on this, but I hope to use the summer to catch up. Ideally I
would like to use Sunday afternoons to make the pages of the keeper recipes
from the preceding week. I’ll get there.
That’s how we meal plan in Shafferland! It helps keep us
accountable to eat balanced meals, use the ingredients we buy, and not default
to eating fast food!
