Meal Planning

As the time approaches for me to start work I am starting to worry about all of my free time disappearing, which prompted me to try and get my daily schedule organized.  Kevin thinks I am crazy for being so worried about this, but I have a hard time believing that it is going to be easy to adjust to working and doing ALL of the household things ... such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping and yard work.  Kevin is not going to have any more free time, and even though I keep telling him he will need to help out more, that doesn't change his schedule.  The biggest thing I am worried about is the cooking/shopping thing, so I focused on streamlining that process this week .. before I start work.  I have never cooked/shopped based on a meal plan, but I am familiar with meal-planning because my mom does it for a living (as a dining service director at a retirement community) and I can imagine that it makes things easier.  Also, on my visit home last week, my friend Laura showed me how she manages to cook at home every night while her and her husband both have over an hour commute every day.  She suscribes to a service via this blog: 5 Dinners in 1 Hour where for about $5 a month she gets a monthly meal plan which organizes her dinners and shopping lists.  Even better, the plan is organized in a way that you can prepare 5 meals in one evening in less than an hour ... so you can basically do all your major prep work on Sunday evening and have your dinners ready to pop in the oven for a week.  I watched her prepare her meals for the week ... and it is no lie ... seriously under and hour and so easy! (The dinner we had was delicious too!)  I have decided not to subscribe to this service at the moment.  I am a slightly picky eater (even though I have gotten better) so I didn't want to sacrifice the control or ability to pick what to eat every week, I also want to be able to shop around coupons I have and grocery store deals.   So I thought awhile and came up with a system that I am going to try on my own to see how it goes. 

To start I organized all of my favorite recipes into a binder (Cookinglight.com is a great resource for recipes .. I use it all the time, and they are easy to print out and keep)

I then planned out a months worth of meals.  I just started by looking at a calendar and writing down a general category for a meal on each day ... such as pork, chicken, pasta, fish, beef, slow cooker, leftovers or quick.  I then went back and picked actual recipes for three weeks straight and put them into a weekly "meal planner" that I just made on my computer (taking ideas from the 5 meals plan).  Here is an example of a few weeks from now:

 

 These are the steps I took to pick actual meals:

1. Look at what coupons I have (can also include looking online for manufacturer coupons and my grocery store website to see what they have on special .. wegmans.com)

2. Pick a few main entrees based on those coupons, for example I have a coupon for Wegman's pre-packaged butternut squash, two coupons for Wegman's "cheese shop", and coupon for a fresh fish purchase.

3. Look through recipes to "match" to a coupon purchase or do a recipe search online for particular items. Butternut squash soup was a given (its one of my favorites, and a Cookinglight recipe).  I usually like to pair the soup with apple and brie grilled cheese, which was made even better by a coupon for cheeses.  Salmon is also one of our favorite meals and we try to eat fish at least once a week so that was easy.  I chose the maple pork chops because I already have boneless pork chops in our freezer, and it would go well with the leftover soup as a side.  The turkey burgers I chose because it is a quick meal, I have another coupon for cheese (which has to be used on a "cheese shop" purchase, aka fancy cheese, like feta and goat cheese) and we already have sweet potato fries.  The chili I chose in order to use the rest of the ground turkey from the burgers, that way I can make just two burgers instead of six, which also enables me to make a smaller batch of chili.  I am trying to make meals fit two people instead of eating a lot of leftovers (we're not leftover people), so re-using the same ingredients that come in large portions (like ground meat) in two completely different meals is a way I can avoid wasting food but still have variety.

4. Then I just glanced quickly through the week to make sure the order of the meals made sense as far as coordinating leftover ingredients and as far as timing the meal preparation.  For example, the soup takes a long time to make .... so it would be a no-go for a weeknight.

5. I pull all of the recipes for that week out of my binder and make a grocery list, being careful to check what I have on hand.  This really doesn't take as long as I thought it would, and I feel so much more focused at the store.  I am only buying things I need rather than thinking in the store "oohh what would be good for dinner and trying to remember all the necessary items".  I also mark down what coupons I have so I remember to get the right brand/size and to use them!  Shopping with coupons is fairly new to me, but planning out my meals is making it much easier to plan around maximum savings.  

6. I then print out my meal plan and put it in my recipe binder, with my shopping list and coupons.  I also put all the recipes for this week right behind the meal plan so they're all right there.

* at this point my shopping list just includes items for meals, that is why I put it in the binder instead of posting it in the kitchen.  We have a dry erase board on the refrigerator that we mark down things we need as we run out of them.  I then take my paper list out of the binder right before I am heading to the store and add everything on the dry erase board to the paper right then.  This allows me to remember the coupons, and "writing" out a list right before shopping is how I shopped in the past so it works for me.

I plan two weeks all the way out at a time, which allows me to use coupons I have on hand before they expire and to look at current specials at the grocery store.  It took me about an hour to do this last week (aside from making the binder and printing out recipes), which I think is completely worth it to have everything more organized, to save more money and to spend less time each night deciding what to eat.  So far it has worked great, but I have just done one shopping trip, and this was a short week anyways because of the holidays.  I will do an update in a couple of weeks to let you know how it is going then!