Meal Planning

We have modified how we do meal planning over the last 2 years.  We started in 2012 with changing our dinner meals to be a protein and two veggies.  We used a white board calendar to make 30 days of ideas for the protein and then we made up the sides every night.  This meant I was buying a lot of groceries and ultimately wasting a lot of food.  The we switched to The Fresh 20 plan and really loved it at first.  However, after about 5 months we found the recipes to be too complicated to follow, some of the ingredients to not work for picky children (and adults!) which meant an entire week of hating our food, and the amount of food was too little for the level of workouts Chris and I were attempting to keep up with.

What I did learn from The Fresh 20 was how to properly meal plan for a week.  I learned how to make recipes that flowed in a week and how to make grocery lists to only purchase the food I need for a week.  I spent about 1 hour every Sunday planning the entire week’s menu, including the sides, and then making a grocery list. 

After about 1.5 months, we had a sufficient number of meals that I could just pick meals for 5 days without having to actually plan a full menu and look up new recipes.  We only choose 5 for the week because we find that we will sometimes have leftovers, have a ‘fend for yourself night’, or go out to eat.  We’ve also narrowed down our list to the things our (sometimes picky) children will eat on a regular basis without much fight or complaint.  I figure since I’ve already done the work, other people should benefit!  So here is the link to 33 meals…we sometimes swap out the side dishes among the meals.  (Let me know if you can’t access the file, I’m happy to email it to you!)