New schedule, new meal planner
Our lives have rearranged a bit this year. D now has the shorter commute, so he going to take over most of the grocery shopping and more of the cooking. This is strange for me because I've been doing the majority of the cooking for years and I have a hard time not hovering when someone else is in the kitchen. D is perfectly capable of cooking but he doesn't have the routine down and he was worried about getting stuck when deciding what to make each week.
I wanted our food prep to be simplified this year anyways, so over the holidays I worked on modifying our system a bit. We now only plan for 3 meals a week and the categories are pared down.
{meal planning}
I disassembled our enormous recipe binder and pulled out our weeknight standbys and then separated them into the four categories I'd selected (the extra category is for sides, in case we feel like adding them to a meal). The remaining recipes are in a new binder which is more for special occasions or entertaining. Each week we plan for one large salad (something that will hold up in the fridge and make good leftovers), one hearty meal based on lentils/meat/pasta (split into three sections for ease) and one quick meal. I made a list of our usual quick meals and the ingredients we'd need for them, along with basic instructions. I don't use a recipe when I make a frittata, for instance, but that sucks for D, who would prefer to work with instructions. This way we have everything pulled together.
To set up meals for the week we do a quick scan to see if we have partially used ingredients from the week before. Then we just choose one recipe from each category, make the grocery list and we're good to go. Having the sections split up this way makes it much easier.
Past adventures in meal planning -
Cooking every weekday for a month
Developing our own meal planning system
In case you're interested in the updated meal planning sheet I use, here is the PDF after the jump (sorry for the click through, but embedding docs in here makes the main page go totally wonky).
Click on this link if the embedded file isn't working for you.
I disassembled our enormous recipe binder and pulled out our weeknight standbys and then separated them into the four categories I'd selected (the extra category is for sides, in case we feel like adding them to a meal). The remaining recipes are in a new binder which is more for special occasions or entertaining. Each week we plan for one large salad (something that will hold up in the fridge and make good leftovers), one hearty meal based on lentils/meat/pasta (split into three sections for ease) and one quick meal. I made a list of our usual quick meals and the ingredients we'd need for them, along with basic instructions. I don't use a recipe when I make a frittata, for instance, but that sucks for D, who would prefer to work with instructions. This way we have everything pulled together.
To set up meals for the week we do a quick scan to see if we have partially used ingredients from the week before. Then we just choose one recipe from each category, make the grocery list and we're good to go. Having the sections split up this way makes it much easier.
Past adventures in meal planning -
Cooking every weekday for a month
Developing our own meal planning system
In case you're interested in the updated meal planning sheet I use, here is the PDF after the jump (sorry for the click through, but embedding docs in here makes the main page go totally wonky).
Click on this link if the embedded file isn't working for you.
More posts from
