Read time: Approximately 4 minutes
Do you cringe when you think about planning an evening meal, every night, for the rest of your life?
One of my favorite Facebook posts says something to this effect:
“I never knew that the hardest part of adulting would be making a meal every single night for the REST OF MY LIFE!”
I relate all too well. Planning and preparing meals does not come naturally to me.
Unfortunately, even if planning and preparing meals is not a natural skill, meals have to be provided and families kept fed.
Fortunately, with a little bit of work, planning and preparing meals is a skill that is pretty easy to learn.
It would have made my life a lot easier if I had learned it way sooner.
The foundation of easy meal planning is a Master Meal List
A Master Meal List will become your guiding light for keeping meal planning easy.
It should be considered a working document subject to change as your meal needs change.
This list is not a pretty, keep it in a binder kind of list. This list is a stick it on the refrigerator and refer to it often kind of list. (As evidenced in the real photo above)
The best way to begin is by simply listing what meals your family is currently eating.
If you eat cereal one night, add it to the list.
If you provide take out one night, put that on the list. (One of the goals of meal planning is to make take out a planned event and not the default dinner of the night!)
No matter how few meals are in your plan to begin with, write them down. The goal is to start where you are and make progress from there.
Continue adding and deleting meals as you figure out what works for your situation.
For most of us, this list is not going to be created in one evening. It is going to take some trial and error to determine what meals work for our lifestyle.
The Master Meal List should be long enough to provide a variety of meals but not too long that it becomes overwhelming to create and maintain.
My target number of meals is twenty-one, but that is a personal preference.
Hang on to the list. It will be your meal planning life raft.
There are two ways to use the Master Meal List
Use your Master Meal List to create a meal rotation
Creating a meal rotation is very simple.
Start at the top of your list, make each meal once and then start over.
Even though it is an easy plan, it is not my preference. Option two is what I currently use.
Once a week, sit down with your Master Meal List and plan the meals for the upcoming week.
I usually do this prior to going to the grocery store. Once per week, grab a piece of paper and list the days of the week.
Using your Master Meal List, choose your meal and plug it into the day on which you want to fix it.
Weekly works best for me because so many things can change. I may have planned a meal I didn’t make and need to use the ingredients I purchased before they go bad.
I may not be in the mood for something and I want to move it around.
Weekly meal planning is a better fit for my often chaotic life.
One thing that simplifies meal planning even more is designating “theme nights”
The idea for making meal planning a little easier on myself by having theme nights, started when I designated Wednesday night as pizza night.
I quickly realized that having certain “theme nights” made it even easier to know which kind of meal I wanted to plug into a certain night.
For instance, I usually grocery shop on Thursday evening. I like to put something in the crock-pot on those days so that I won’t have to cook after I return home.
So if Thursday evening is a “crock pot theme night”, I know to plug in a crock-pot recipe to my meal plan for Thursday.
Here are some of my favorite “theme night” ideas:
Pasta night
Sandwich Night
Traditional Food Night
Casserole Night
Crock-Pot Night
Left Over Night
Breakfast for Dinner night
Popcorn Night (I am only half kidding right here. It works for me. Brian, not so much 😂 )
Meal planning does not have to be difficult. By investing a little bit of time getting started, meal planning can become downright easy!
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