Raise your hand if you don’t know what’s for dinner.
Raise it again if you hate being asked what’s for dinner.
I think everyone knows that meal planning makes your life easier. It gives you an idea of what to make for dinner and what to buy at the store. It can also help you stick to your food budget.
But meal planning itself can be a real pain in the neck. I have often sat down to plan a menu, only to end up doing one of three things:
- Become overly ambitions and unrealistic about what kind of time I have in the evenings. We’re having spiralized sweet potato curry with fresh naan and roasted zucchini one night. Yeah, right. That night rolls around and we eat frozen tater tots and green beans.
- I plan easy enough things, but we don’t actually want to eat them. Let’s see, baked potatoes Monday night, baked sweet potatoes Tuesday night, beans and rice on Wednesday…
- I completely blank on what we ever actually eat. Hmm, there’s pasta and… Well, sometimes we eat pasta…
I don’t always want to eat baked potatoes and I definitely don’t always have three hours to spend on dinner. So here is my winning formula for meal planning, the tried and true method for making a menu plan that we actually stick to:
Theme nights!
Its only fault is that it sounds slightly more fun than it really is.
Each night of the week is given a theme, then we make the menu each week or month based on the themes. We currently plan our menu each week, and here is how we have it structured:
Sunday: Breakfast for dinner
Monday: Mexican
Tuesday: Asian
Wednesday: American
Thursday: Indian
Friday: Soup & bread (we switch to salad & bread in the summer)
Saturday: Pizza & salad ( I also make muffins for breakfast)
We have several favorites for each theme that we alternate through the month based on what’s on sale, what we feel like, and what our schedule is looking like for the week. Here’s what this week looks like:
Sunday: Breakfast tacos
Monday: Nachos (heavy on the good stuff, light on the cheese)
Tuesday: Vegetable lo mein
Wednesday: Burgers/veggie burgers
Thursday: Curried potatoes
Friday: Creamy broccoli soup
Saturday: Veggie pizza
You might have noticed that we only meal plan for dinner. We keep staples like cereal, eggs, bread, etc. around for breakfast and lunch, and we also make use of leftovers for those meals. If you want to plan all your meals for the week, there is a great free printable here.
There’s no rule for setting the themes; if you want to have pancakes every Tuesday, go for it! If you want to make Mexican food four times per week, no one is stopping you.
Want to do a monthly meal plan instead of a weekly one? You can fill out a calendar template. I just have a list item called Menu in my Safeway Wunderlist and I list the items for the meal plan that week. Easy peasy.
A few more tips:
Don’t be too rigid. If you need to move Monday’s meal to Thursday, the world will not end.
Be realistic. Even with this method of meal planning you can make the mistake of being overly optimistic about what kind of time you have to cook. Visualize yourself cooking that meal after a long day. Is it going to happen?
Frozen vegetables are your friend. We keep big bags of frozen vegetables from Costco in our chest freezer so that no matter the meal, we can fill half our plate with veggies. We just throw them on a sheet pan (these ones are nice) and roast them in the oven.
Plan your meals around your grocery shopping day. If you want to have a big salad for one meal, plan that meal close to the day you go grocery shopping so that the greens and veggies are fresh.
And that’s all there is to it. I have tried a variety of ways to plan meals, and this is by far the easiest one to stick to. If I want to plan a more adventurous, involved meal, I plan that meal for a Friday or Saturday night when I know I will have the time to do it. Otherwise those frozen tater tots will make an appearance.
How do you meal plan? Do you usually meal plan or do you wing it each night?