Weekly Meal Planning

Through our 25 years together, my husband Drake and I have been avid meal-planners. For us, that means we start the week with an idea of what will have for dinner each night, using Sunday as time to get a running start on "food for the week." I hadn't given our system much thought until a year or so ago, when I read an article in the New York Times written by a working mom who uses a remarkably similar system.  She had "drawn a line in the sand," unwilling to surrender home-cooked meals for her family.

Given current times, it seems more people are cooking at home. I'm completely sold on the advantages of home cooking from a cost, health, and pure food enjoyment perspective.

For this post, I'll take you on a quick tour of our meal-planning routine--and share some great resources for developing your own meal-planning process...

The Start

Our planning cycle begins Saturday morning when we start evaluating what we might eat during the weekend and upcoming work week. This involves a loose evaluation that typically includes:

• What's in the fridge? This is a great time to see what needs to be used--or what needs to be cleaned out.
• What's on special at the market? Here we either check the weekly specials mailing we receive or view it online (many groceries post specials on-line).
• What's in season? Many seasonal items are highlighted in the weekly mailer, but not all. We are not shy about calling the produce department if we have a question about what's available.
• What's our schedule next week? Understanding the contour of the week is important. Some weeks we have more time for weekday cooking than others. Some days we may not be eating at home.

If the above seems protracted, in reality, it's not. It's typically a 5 or 10 minute routine that gets meal-planning in progress.

A Pattern to the Week's Menus

We have a baseline pattern to our cooking routine:

• Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday tend to be cooking days.
• Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are more likely to re-purpose leftovers.
• Sunday typically involves a roast, stew, casserole (in cool weather) or a storehouse of grilled items (in warmer weather) to carry us through the first part of the week.
• Saturday is more of a wild card food-wise. We may be entertaining or going out or just hanging around home.

Our baseline pattern is just a starting point, adjusted to each particular week.

Establishing a baseline pattern is important because it provides some constraints to work within. Facing the week's meal planning with a blank slate, I think, can be overwhelming. Another approach is to designate a specific type of dish for each day of the week. For example:

• Monday: Vegetarian
• Tuesday: Chicken
• Wednesday: Pasta
• Thursday: Casserole
• Friday: Pizza
• Saturday: Seafood
• Sunday: Roast

With some type of a established meal pattern you are less likely to become paralyzed by choice in the planning process.

Scheduling Meal Plans

I recently started entering meal plans right into my appointment calendar (rather than working it out on paper separately). I enter each day's dinner as a color-coded "all day event" so it appears at the top of each day. The advantage of working right in my calendar is that more clearly fits meal plans into what else is going on during the week.

Preparing the Shopping List

Once I've figured out what we'll have for the week, I gather up the recipes I'll need and bring them into the kitchen to prepare the shopping list. By tackling the list-writing in the kitchen, I can easily to check what items I already have and what I need to buy.  We have a stash of scrap paper that Drake (aka Mr. Thrifty) has cut-up for shopping lists. I like the "footprint" of a long, narrow piece of paper--less bulk to deal with at the grocery than a full 8 1/2" by 11" sheet.

Shopping

Armed with shopping list, it's off to the grocery store. We are lucky to have a neighborhood market that features fresh, local produce. Even after reviewing the weekly flyer, sometimes there is a special or other featured item that causes me to re-think a planned meal. In this case, I'll shift gears. Pre-iPhone, I sometimes wandered over to the magazine section, browsing food magazines for inspiration. Now, I get out my iPhone, search for the ingredient in my Evernote recipe data base, and pull up likely recipes. I find grocery shopping a bit of an adventure, full of meal ideas and surprises, so if I don't mind re-thinking plans once I get to the store.

Cooking

While I love to do more leisurely cooking on the weekends, weekdays don't normally provide that luxury. Sunday afternoons are typically reserved for a "big cook" - prepping and cooking ahead to the extent possible for the week. My goal is to keep weekday food preparation down to 30 minutes or less. Any longer than that and it pushes dinner later, which not only disrupts the evening but I am more likely to snack or get over-hungry when dinner runs too late.

The Best Laid Plans...

Sometimes, we don't get much of running start to the week--for example if we've been out of town for the weekend. Or, we have some unexpected schedule change. For these situations, we have a repertoire of quick meals we can prepare with items we typically have on-hand. (Coming soon: a recipe series on our favorite pantry meals.)

Frozen Vegetables: The Other Fast Food.  I think frozen vegetables are a seriously underrated alternative among food purists--and I much prefer them to the prepped and bagged "fresh" vegetables in the grocery. This topic warrants a post of its own, but suffice it to say that tossing some frozen vegetables in a skillet with shredded rotisserie chicken and a favorite stir-fry sauce beats most prepared food and fast-food alternatives. In my humble opinion anyway.

Resources

There are all sort of resources available to help with meal-planning--from paper forms to software applications to services that do the meal-planning for you. I've listed a sampling of these below.

Articles & Blog Posts

A Mom Puts Family on Her Meal Plan (New York Times)

How to Start Meal Planning with Google Calendar (eHow)

Creating a Weekly Meal Plan (Unclutterer)

Meal Planning Forms

"Traditional" Meal-Planning Form (OrganizedHome.com)

"Fun & Funky" Meal-Planning Form (Future Girl Craft Blog)
I love this form!

Tasty Planner
Tasty Planner is a well-designed (and free) web application that lets you add recipes to a weekly meal planner. Ingredients required for recipes are automatically added to an (editable) grocery list, which you can print, email, or view on your iPhone. With Tasty Planner you can also add your meal plan to any calendar that supports the iCalendar standard, including Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and Google Calendar.

Recipe Management Software
Many recipe management programs include meal-planning functionality: MacGourmet (OS X only; meal-planning is a separate plug-in to the core product), MasterCook (Windows only), Shop 'N Cook Menu (OS X and Windows).

Meal-Planning Services
If the thought of figure out all the meals and putting together shopping lists is daunting, there are web-based services that do this groundwork for you (for a subscription fee). These include Saving Dinner, Dinners in a Flash, and Meal Mixer. 

How do you plan meals?

I'd love to hear how you plan meals. Do you have special tips and tricks? Feel free to comment and share your ideas.

I hope you enjoyed this post! To view my full list of step-by-step recipes, see the complete recipe index.

If you'd like to subscribe to future posts, you can do it here.

Comments

[Trish]

Meal planning is such a time saver! Generally, I plan a variety of slow-cooking or labor intensive meals with some quicker dinners - pastas, fish, or 1 pot/pan dinners. Instead of prescribing a day to each dinner, I list the menu on the fridge then choose a dinner in the morning depending on how the day is planned and what we are in the mood for, or what needs to be used up in the fridge. I plan for two weeks at a time.

[PaniniKathy]

What incredibly helpful post! I've been making small attempts at meal planning over the past few weeks and now you've given me some great ideas for how to do a better job of it. I started using Evernote after you suggested it a few weeks ago - it's so great! Thanks so much and keep the great ideas coming! :-)

[Sally]

Hello

I just found your blog a few days ago, and placed it on MyYahoo for updates...

loved this post, I do about the same, not to the extent of organization you have, but after reading, I HAD to go start a google calendar....

see what you did? :-)

[Haley W.]

Great post! I plan my meals much the same as you do yours - from scanning for specials (or an early trip to the farmers market for good produce), to the list making, and even calling an audible at the store every once in a while.

One thing I generally plan for is one night in which I make an entirely vegan meal. I like the idea of reducing my dependence on meat and animal products. I'm not willing to give them up, but planning them out of a meal helps lessen their prominence in our diet.

We also always plan for one take-out night, and one "date night." Those sometimes become a pantry meal, a dinner out, take-out - they're flexible. We both work a lot of hours, so sometimes even a quick dinner feels out of reach. Planning this way keeps us from wasting food and feeling guilty when we planned a meal and neither of us are up to cooking.

[Lisha]

I just happened upon your blog and just love it! Thank you for sharing all this great info! I started meal planning a few months ago after years of being stressed out by dinner time decisions. It has been haphazard, but has succeeded in making cooking fun again for me:) I had read elsewhere about using Google Calendar for meal planning and now you've convinced me I need to look more into that.

[Hippu]

Really helpful post! Thank you for sharing all this :-) It gave me many new ideas how to rationalize our meal planning.

[Amy]

Thanks for this post. My biggest problem is actually preparing and eating what I have planned, especially after a hard day. We often resort to nachos or hummus on those days! I would really appreciate seeing some of your recipes with frozen vegetables and under 30 min meals. We eat a lot of hummus and soup (maybe that's what you eat, too?)

[Trish]

This is so useful. I try to plan my meals but I don't have a good system for it. And at the end of the week I feel SO guilty when I have to toss out vegies or dairy products that are beyond their shelf-life. I bet your fridge is very ordered and uncluttered!

(found you via Tasty Kitchen, in case you were wondering! And now I'm going to subscribe to your posts.)

[recipejohn]

That's really fabulous to hear how things can be made more easy and comfortable and more in case of meals, its better to plan in advance then take hasty decisions and this is gonna make the whole week, thank you.

[Janis]

Great post!

I start out with a monthly grid that I created in Excel. I use it to plan weekly menu lists along different categories such as legumes, poultry, seafood, dairy/eggs, slow-cooker and so on. I'm only cooking for two (spouse and myself), and we enjoy leftovers. I found that I was cooking too much when I tried assigning strict categories to days of the week, so I try to leave flexibility in the schedule and only plan to really cook full meals about three or four times a week, with leftovers, make-aheads, and slow-cooker soups and stews filling in for the rest. We try to eat local produce in season (supplemented by what I freeze and can), so I created a tab for each month that lets me create menus using what's likely to be in season and available that month.

The Excel workbook worked fairly well, but was still a little too much effort since it's just menus, not the recipes or lists of needed ingredients. However, I just discovered Mealfire.com - a free web app that makes it very easy to collect and modify recipes that I find online (or want to enter by hand). I can assign tags, print recipes, schedule them (can link to/display on my Google calendar) and create shopping lists. There's even a companion iPhone app. BTW, I'm not affiliated with Mealfire in any way, just a happy user.

[Darnell]

I agree! Your idea is so brilliant. Meal planning is very important in order that we should not too extravagant to buy groceries so that in this way keeps us from wasting food. This is very useful for people who are newly married. Thank you very much for sharing ideas...

[Graham]

I love the idea of meal planning. But it seems like it took quite a while to prepare it for the whole week. But this definitely worth to try.