Combat Convenience Eating: Part 2

Well, I’ve found it.  That glorious meal planning binder that served me well years ago.  It is a bit dusty, and a bit worn around the edges…but who am I to judge a book by its cover?

In my last post, I referred to taking the effort of decision out of meal planning.  And that is exactly what I plan to do.  Making those daily decisions have rusted the wheels in my home management tight.  And its time for a change!

It’s a funny trade-off, but I’ve found that in order to save time, I need to make time for planning, and in this instance, for deciding.

Set aside an hour or two to plan, and your summer will thank you for it!

Step One:  Choose a theme for each night of the week.

Here will be my rundown…

Sunday:  Roasted Chicken Night

Monday:  Mexican

Tuesday:  Salads

Wednesday:  Pasta

Thursday:  Forage for yourselves

Friday:  Fish

Saturday:  Ethnic

(Disclaimer:  Thursday’s forage for yourselves is limited to foraging in the refrigerator and pantry shelves.  Just wanted you to know that I do not intend to send my children out to the fields to pick their own dinner.  LOL!)

Step Two:  Choose 4-8 of your favorite meals under each theme.

Four recipes for each theme will give you a one-month rotation of meals.  Maybe you only want to do two weeks?  Just pick two meals for each theme.  Does your family like a lot of variety?  Dig deep, and brainstorm eight meals for each theme - this would give you an 8 week rotation.  Each family’s dynamic is different, so this should be what works well for you.

In our family it might look like this:

Sunday:  Instant Pot Roast Chicken; Lemon-Rosemary Baked Chicken; Roast Chicken with root vegetables, Instant Pot Mexican-Spiced Roast chicken; Roasted Herbes de Provence Chicken

Monday:  Beef and Black Been Enchiladas; Skillet Lime Chicken Fajitas; Monterrey Jack Quesadillas with Pear and Jalapeño salsa; Chicken Chilaquiles; Carne Adovada (Pork tacos)

Tuesday:  Cobb Salad; Caesar Salad; Strawberry Fields Salad; Fajitas Salad; Taco Salad

Wednesday:  Pasta with Ham and Peas; Chicken Pesto, pea, and sun dried tomato Pasta; Spaghetti; Chicken Alfredo; Chicken and Feta Greek Pasta

Thursday:  Leftovers, sandwiches, veggies and dip, fruit, or anything else you can find!  Plus, I will pop some popcorn  :)

Friday:  Mustard-Pecan Salmon; Shrimp and Feta; Salmon Cakes; Fish Fry; Shrimp Tacos

Saturday:  Joojeh kebabs; Falafel; Thai-Basil Chicken; Green Curry Pork and Vegetables; Lamb Rogan Josh

Step Three:  Write your choices down so they can be quickly referenced each week. 

Here is a very simple meal planning form that you can use - even just to hand write your choices into each box.  Remember, the goal here is to take the decision-making out of daily life.  Writing down your meal rotations so that you can easily access them is a game-changer.

Step Four:  Organize everything into one binder.

Print off any recipes you’d like to reference for your binder.  Perhaps you’ve chosen recipes that are easy to pull-off without the recipe - that’s great!  Just include the ones you really need.

Make a cover sheet for each themed night.  In my binder this involved a marker, a piece of paper, and me quickly writing the theme down in large letters. Not super fancy, but it sure does the job!

Sort your recipes into stacks for each themed night, and put the cover sheet with the name of each nightly theme on each stack.

Three-hole punch the whole lot, and stick it all in your binder, starting with Sunday’s theme, and then placing the cover and recipes for each day’s theme into your binder, in order by day of the week.  When you have it all in place, it should be easy to page through to a given day’s theme and see all the recipes you’d need for that day’s meal.

Place your filled out meal planning form as the first page of your binder, for easy reference.

And voila!  You now have a simple and fool-proof method to take one thing off of your daily plate - deciding what is for dinner.

I can attest that this simple process of taking decision-making out of the equation really makes the difference for me.  When I have a plan, and simply follow it, I find it much easier to avoid the pitfalls of convenience eating for my family.

Sometimes to make a change, it feels like I need to reinvent the wheel.  But really, making just a small adjustment often goes a long way to solving a problem.  In this case, rather than a new wheel I think I just needed some WD-40.

I would love to hear of any quick and delicious recipes you choose to include in your rotation for this summer.  Shoot me an email!