Meal Planning

The last few months, I've been trying to be better about making healthy, intentional meals.  When we first got Anna, we were eating a lot of freezer meals that I'd made previously as well as eating out or at our parents' homes.  We were trying to adjust to life with a newborn and I had little time for meal planning or cooking or even thinking about it!  Now that life has settled into a routine, I knew I had to readdress the issue of meals.

You see, I love to cook.  I hate to clean up...  I like my kitchen to be spotless and when I cook I often feel like it explodes and I'm left with a giant mess to clean up.  Dishes are my least favorite chore, they seem to never stop coming!  So I needed to devise some way to enjoy cooking dinner for my family, save us money on groceries, incorporate food for Anna, and make minimal mess!

So meal planning was my solution.  You might be thinking "duh" but it's something that overwhelmed me.  Why would I decide what I'm going to have for dinner 3 weeks from now?  That seems crazy, how do I gather all of those ingredients? 

So here's what I do.  It works and I like it. A lot.


- We grocery shop once a month, on or around payday.  Aside from the short trips for milk, we try to stay away from the grocery store.  The longer I'm in there, the more I pick up, and the more money we spend.

- A few days before the big grocery shopping event I make a menu.  I have a few cookbooks, including one that my mom and I have compiled of family recipes.  I try to find recipes that have similar ingredients, and I also try to find ones with ingredients that are on sale that week.  For instance, if one thing uses pork, I buy pork chops in bulk (on sale) and find other recipes that utilize pork in a different way.  This may sound like our meals are boring, but I make sure I'm creative to avoid that.  When I find a recipe, I write it down on the calendar and I write down where the recipe was from, what page it's on, and then add the ingredients to my grocery list.  I throw in a few leftover days on the weekends usually (although Jeremy likes leftovers for lunches) and Fridays are homemade pizza days and I account for any days I don't need to make dinner (this month there were a lot!).

- An organized list is key to my system.  So I use excel.  I sort everything by group (I know the aisles in the grocery store so they're pretty much sorted by aisle).  As I find recipes and add them to the calendar, I add the ingredients (that I don't already have on hand) to the list.  This organized list has saved me from forgetting things and being all over the store at any given time.

- All month I've cut coupons from the paper and online sources (our printer's out of ink at the moment, so my coupon supply was down this month) and I sort the coupons by section (the same as my list sections).

- I match my coupons to my list and put them in an envelop.  With my list, my coupons, my list manager (Jer), and my grabber-off-the-shelfer (Anna :-)) safely tucked in the Mei Tai, we head to the stores.  We go to Sa.m's Club first and pick up the things we need in bulk.  This saves us a lot of money (especially on formula).  Then we go to Meij.er.  After a long evening of shopping and countless people telling us how adorable our baby is and countless people laughing at how loud she is, we check out and head home.

- When we get home, we put it all away and I begin making meals.  We went grocery shopping last night, so I made meals today during naptimes.  I prep and/or freeze whatever I can.  For instance, today I made: chili, lasagna soup, prepped pork chops for a maple pork chop recipe, pureed peas, sweet potatoes, pears, avocado, squash and bananas for Anna, chopped veggies for minestrone and corn chowder (apparently I was in a soup mood, I'm ready for fall...) and pesto. 

- Each day I look at the next day's menu, being sure to set out anything from the freezer I need, and meal time is easy peasy!

And that is how I make a big mess all at once and my kitchen is clean for the rest of the month!  And my family's eating healthy!  And my baby girl always has homemade food on hand!