Are evenings stressful for you? Do you frequently end up rushing around after work or school or evening activities, trying to figure out what to cook for dinner? Do you end up ordering take-out or going out to eat more than you would really like to because you don’t know what to cook or don’t have the ingredients that you need to do so? If so, this simplification tip is for you.
Before I had kids, I spent lots of time cooking. Let me rephrase that, as I still spend lots of time cooking. Before I had kids, I spent lots of time preparing elaborate meals. I love trying new foods, experimenting with recipes, and recreating dishes I’ve tasted and enjoyed.
However, once my boys were born, I found that I simply didn’t have hours to apportion to a single meal, at least not on an every day basis. I found that figuring out what I was inspired to cook as dinner time started to approach didn’t work for me any more. I had first one child, and now two, who get cranky when they don’t get to eat as soon as they’re hungry. As a family, we needed to start eating at a more consistent dinner time.
In order to pull off this new [to me] consistent dinner time, I started finding it helpful to figure out what we were eating for dinner early in the day. This way, I could have ingredients defrosted (if need be) as well as have everything on hand and ready to cook when the time came.
After doing this for a bit, I found it was even easier to start planning a week or so worth of meals in advance. Not only did this make it so my evenings were less frantic, it also made grocery shopping so much easier. In addition to knowing what I was going to prepare, it made it so I had all of the ingredients on hand for the meals that I planned to make. This eliminated those last-minute trips to the market.
Meal planning helped me to reduce our household’s overall amount of food waste (see HERE for more ideas), simplified my grocery shopping, made our evenings go more smoothly, and helped me to have a quick answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?” It works for me, and I’m guessing it will work for you.
Do you meal plan? If not, how do you approach your main meal of the day?
My mom always did meal planning, so it has been ingrained in me ever since college. I have now passed that along to our college-age daughter. Also from my mom comes this unwritten rule of “one trip to the grocery store per week”. Not only does meal planning relieve stress during the week of deciding what to eat, but it simplifies grocery shopping and keeps the food budget in better balance.
To try to simplify things even more, I have made monthly meal planners so I can rotate the foods we like to eat. It can be hard to come up with 30 different meals, but I come close. Each week has a number 1-4, and whatever week of the month we are on, I go with that meal plan. If food is leftover from the prior week, I incorporate that. If we have a really funky week, or I forget to defrost the meat, I just go with the flow. It isn’t written in stone!
However, the hardest part for me, is always the side dishes. Our family likes meat, a vegetable, and a side dish. Some meals include all three, such as fajitas, chili with cornbread, or tacos. But finding healthy side dishes for steak, pork, and chicken are my challenge. We are trying to eat low-carbs lately, so this part of meal planning is a work-in-progress.
I love that you have almost a month’s worth of meals. I want to add a few more into our rotation so we’re closer to that.