Do you struggle to get dinner on the table? Do you resort too often to fast food or convenience meals because there’s “nothing for dinner?” I did, for the longest time. I’d heard about meal planning, but avoided it like the plague. I hated planning out the current day’s dinner, let alone dinner for the entire month!
When I started preparing freezer meals, everything changed. For one thing, I had to list my meals somewhere so I wouldn’t forget about them. It might as well be on a calendar! And since I was writing down 15-20 meals for the month, it was no big deal to write down a few more.
I start with the days I know we won’t be home. We usually do spaghetti on Saturdays, so I write that in. Sundays are hectic for us, so it’s leftovers. I fill in the rest of the dates with my freezer meals and a few of my daughter’s favorites like fish sticks and burritos.
Easy peasy, the planning’s done. I don’t know what I was kicking and screaming about for so long. It’s really quite simple once I have a stock of freezer meals. The planning takes all of 5 minutes.
Another key to success for me is giving myself permission to be flexible. It’s a plan, not the law. In fact, I frequently make changes to my meal plan – at least once a week. It seems counter-intuitive, but having a plan has actually made me more flexible. (When your only option is microwave egg rolls because you haven’t thought about dinner until you’re starving, that’s not flexibility. Yet that described my approach to dinner for years.)
By the way, my meal plan is one thing I don’t have in my planner. I know in that post I advocated having everything in one place. But, for me, the meal plan falls under the Store-It-Where-It’s-Used category. I keep it on a wipe board on my fridge, because that’s where I’ll see it – and therefore use it. (And here’s a bonus tip: It bugged me when I’d write in or change meals, and the dates got wiped off. My hand tends to rub over them, I guess. So I use a Wet Erase marker for the dates since they don’t change for the month, and magnetic dry erase markers for the meals, since they are subject to change.)
Meal planning is an easy way to simplify your life because it takes the day-to-day thinking out of dinner. Just check your calendar and cook what’s listed. And like I said in the beginning of this series: Simplicity is all about easy ways to make your life simpler and save yourself time and energy so you can focus on the most important things like family. Have you been planning your meals? Resisting it? Let me know in the comments. I love to hear from my readers!
Holly, pls come do my planning !
You bet! But only if you feed me 😉