Meal Planning Tips
How to create a meal plan for your family
If you spend too much time on Pinterest, you might get the idea that it's normal to be cooking a new recipe every night of the week, and always have a lovely menu planned for your family with a new dish every night. That's marvelous. But not real. I don't know anybody who actually does this. How can you? If you got kids and jobs and housework and all of the things, I think very few people have time to cook like that.
I'm not sure how we got to the point where we somehow started thinking that this is what we were supposed to be doing. It's not realistic, and I don't think any other culture in the world does this. Most other cultures around the world eat fairly simple diets - a routine formula that consists of a basic starch (noodles, rice, bread, pasta, potato, depending on what part of the world you are in) with simply prepared seasonal local vegetables, and a bit of meat if you can afford it. They repeat the same basic meals with the same basic seasoning and local spices almost every day, cooking more elaborate dishes only for guests and special occasions.
But somehow we have gotten away from this, and I think put way too much pressure on ourselves.
I see meal plans on Pinterest that promote "no repeats!", and I say no to that. We need repeats. Busy moms need predictably. Kids love predictably. They call it comfort food for a reason. When our lives are crazy busy, our days feel like we're living through a tornado, I think we need a meal plan of easy, predictable favorites that we know our family will love and we know we can get on the table quickly. We don't need "no repeats".
I think we're too conditioned to variety to be able to eat the same meal every day, but we can at least follow a repeatable and predictable schedule that makes meal planning a lot easier.
My practical method of meal planning for our busy family:
I follow a plan that sets a basic guideline or theme for each night of the week, and just repeat it week after week. I don't make the exact same thing each time, but it's usually just simple variations on the basic theme.
Monday: Soup or stew
Tuesday: Tacos, or Mexican
Wednesday: Something rice based, or Asian
Thursday: Pasta or kid food
Friday: Pizza
Saturday: Leftovers
Sunday: Roast or grill, meat or fish
Monday is our full day, so a soup or stew that I can have made ahead when we get home late works really well for us and keeps us from eating out. On Friday pizza night we mix it up a lot - sometimes it's delivery, sometimes it's frozen pizzas from the grocery store, sometimes we make it completely from scratch and have fun putting lots of different toppings on. I switch the nights around occasionally, just depending on what our schedule is at different times of year, but the basic themes stay the same.
I have a page in my notebook where I keep lists of ideas for each theme - a list of my favorite easy soups to make, or variations on the taco theme, or simple Asian rice dishes. So then, when I am figuring out my meal plan for the month, it's really easy to just look through my lists and pick 4 from each category.