How I Meal Plan
My goals for our diet and meal routine are pretty simple:
I want the vast majority of our meals to be home-cooked and nutritious
I don’t want to waste food (it’s bad for the planet and for our budget)
I don’t want to be constantly thinking about what I’m going to cook the next day
I only want to go to the grocery store once a week
That’s pretty much it! (See, my love of simplicity even extends to my goal-setting.) But a few years ago, I was struggling to actually make it happen. I’m not going to wax poetic here, because we’ve all been there: busy days, no motivation, and you’re trying to figure out how to turn a fridge full of half-bad food into a half-decent meal.
I’ve cracked the code. For me, all it took was Pinterest, a binder, and a custom shopping list. Let’s talk!
Using Pinterest for Meal Planning
I love Pinterest. I was an early-adopter (back in 2011, when you had to request an invite), and I’ve used it ever since. But it wasn’t great for organizing recipes until they started letting us create subsections in our boards. Now I have a main recipe board that I’ve divided into sections that are intuitive to me: Make it Again! is a section for recipes I’ve tried and liked enough to make again; Entrees is where I keep most of the dishes that end up on our dinner table (or on our laps while we eat on the sofa); I also have sections for Desserts + Breads, Drinks, Appetizers + Sides, Dips and Sauces, and Breakfast.
The nice thing about Pinterest is that you can organize it to suit your brain. Maybe your board would be split up by type of protein or regional cuisines. Mostly, this is how I add new recipes to our diet. I make about 1 new recipe each week, and they almost always come from a Pinterest board. When I see a food blogger post something great on Instagram, I save it to an Instagram folder and then I’ll go back through and find them on the blog to pin. It does take a little bit of work. When the mood strikes, I’ll take an hour and go looking for some new ideas on popular food blogs so I’ll have options later.
Food blogs I visit often: Half Baked Harvest, Smitten Kitchen, The Woks of Life, Pinch of Yum
Creating a Recipe Book
In 2019, I was tired of needing to have my phone to cook dinner, so I made the digital physical. I bought a huge binder, some page protectors, and dividers, and I started printing my favorite recipes (most of them from the Make it Again! Pinterest board). This was also the time I started making big changes to my found recipes, so I’d pull the paper out of its protector and write notes on it while I cooked. If I changed so many elements that I could barely read it anymore, I typed it up and put it in a folder on Google Drive. (Would you like to see all the recipes? They’re here waiting to be reformatted and photographed. I hope most of them will make their way onto this blog eventually.)
Though I love the ability to digitally access recipes, the tangibility of the binder helps me. It feels less overwhelming to pull it off the shelf and flip through for something that sounds good. Every weekend, I pull out 4 or 5 recipes for the week ahead. I magnet them to our refrigerator in the order I plan to use them. The page protectors keep them clean while we cook - I wipe them down if we spill something in the process. Added bonus of this method - now my shopping list is right there. If I’m trying a new recipe, I print it - if we like it, it goes in the binder with my notes. If not, it gets recycled (and deleted off my Pinterest boards).
I sometimes think happily about this binder growing through the years, becoming a small capsule of a life of family meals, made with love. Physical things have that power in a way digital ones don’t.
The Best Shopping List in the World
In 2019, I made a custom shopping list with the things we buy the most frequently. I searched around for the best price and ended up getting them printed at Office Depot. It was about $12 for 4 pads of 50 sheets each, which is the minimum order.
I love having this on our counter - when one of us notices that we’re running low on eggs or milk, we just check the box and move on with our day. When I have our recipes for the week, I’m able to make quick work of the grocery list.
It’s such a simple thing, but it’s made the mental work of grocery shopping a lighter load. I’ve had people in the store ask me where they can buy one.
Well, you could buy one - here’s one from Wal Mart; here’s one from Target - or you can download this one. Here’s a pdf file. Here’s the template if you’d like to customize your own.
Planning the Meals
A lot of meal-planning I’ve seen involves batch prep work. I don’t do much of that, because that’s a chunk of time I don’t want to give up on the weekends. I generally don’t feel too rushed on weeknights. Most of the meals I make are ready in under an hour, chopping and cooking included. If I make a long, complicated meal, it’s usually for a special occasion and thus on a day I am happy to spend the time.
Instead, I focus on making a meal plan that creates a good amount of leftovers for our lunches, mixes proteins, and is generally nutritious. Some weeks are more veggie-heavy than others; it depends on the season and our food-moods. Sometimes I aim for things that have overlapping ingredients so we don’t waste anything, but I generally don’t overthink it. I pretty frequently include what I call a “fridge-dump” recipe that serves to clear out any vegetables that are looking sad. In week one, it was the lentil sausage stew and green curry; in week two it’s the vegetable fried rice.
Here is what last week’s plan looked like:
Monday: Lentil Sausage Stew | I’ve been making this for years. I use a full pound of sausage, but other than that I make it exactly as instructed (the highest compliment I can give a recipe).
Tuesday: Thai Black Pepper Chicken | A new recipe for this week! It’ll be a repeat; we really liked it.
Wednesday: Baked Salmon and Roasted Brussels Sprouts | We have this meal at least once a month. The foil pack is my favorite way to make salmon, though I bake it for more like 20-25 minutes. This time I used balsamic instead of lemon juice, and I change the herbs based on my mood. For sprouts, I half lengthwise, toss with olive oil, salt and adobo, and roast at 375ºF for about 45 minutes until they’re starting to char.
Thursday: Chicken and Dumplings | My recipe!
Friday: Green Curry Chicken | Another new recipe for this week, and another winner. I like that this one can be made with whatever vegetables we have on hand. I used a little less broth to make it thicker, and I used lime zest instead of kaffir lime leaves.
Saturday: Creamy Tortellini Vegetable Soup | Another new recipe. Joey liked it more than I did; I did like that I was eating a huge pile of kale and carrots and not thinking about it. This recipe makes a lot of soup!
Sunday: leftovers
And here’s what next week looks like (it’s a little more lazy and rice-based. Food moods!):
Monday: Carnita bowls | We made carnitas on Sunday, split the batch in 3, and froze two of them for use later. The final third will turn into various meals throughout the week.
Tuesday: Golden Rice with Chickpeas | A recent super-favorite vegetarian meal around here - Joey cheers when he sees it on the meal plan. I add 1/2 tsp of Penzey’s curry to the rice and usually use frozen spinach. If you make it, you must top it with Greek yogurt, cilantro, and mint.
Wednesday: Chicken Shawarma + Salad | This recipe is such a winner. I love to serve it on a pita with feta, tomatoes, and Tzatziki!
Thursday: Carnita Something? | This is a great example about how my planning is occasionally rather lazy and still turns out fine. Might be a salad. Might be grilled cheese. Might be on top of broccoli fritters with a fried egg.
Friday: Vegetable fried rice + Steamed Eggs | No idea how this one will turn out, but the steamed eggs look absolutely fascinating to me, and I want to try them! It’s my understanding that it’s generally a side dish, but I don’t care.
Saturday and Sunday: leftovers + takeout night (it’s 2021, and I get to call that “supporting our local economy”)
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