Meal Planning

Meal planning is a way in which you (obviously) plan your meals for a time period and shop only once and buy just enough food to make all of your meals.  This is an excellent skill to learn because #1 it removes a lot of stress off the cook about what to eat, it saves money at the grocery store because you aren't buying food without a plan (imagine no more vegetables going bad because you forgot about them!), and helps the cook plan his or her day based on what food is to be cooked and what times it needs to be started.  There will be no more dinner times rolling around where the household cook is looking in his or her cabinet trying to plan a dinner on short notice.

I personally plan my meals two weeks out.  This is a nice period of time to plan without getting overwhelmed, and isn't too long that all of your vegetables will go bad.  Some people plan a months worth of meals in advance, and some even cook a whole months worth of food in a day or over a weekend, then eating out of their freezer.  That is awesome because you won't waste anything - you buy what you need and cook it right away.  The downside is that you literally spend a day or two on your feet in the kitchen trying to cook a bunch of meals at once, and then you need a big freezer to store all of your food.

I plan my meals by sitting down, usually on a Sunday evening after the kids have gone to bed.  I open my master cookbook and look at the recipes in there.  It holds all of the recipes we like to eat, and I keep a constant stream of new recipes in the back that we want to try, so we're never eating the same thing over and over again.

My planner consists of planning breakfasts, lunches and dinners for two weeks.  I don't plan specific meals to each day - usually - but I do plan 14 breakfasts (usually oatmeal during the week with something special on the weekends), 14 lunches (usually leftovers), and 14 dinners with two sides each.  The night before I go to bed I decide what meal we'll eat the next day and I will pull out anything frozen that needs to thaw overnight, and prepare myself for what I may need to do cooking wise during the day.  If it's a crockpot meal, it's put together first thing in the morning usually. 

I try to plan in home-made snacks, breads, crackers, pies, etc. so I don't make multiple trips to a store, and have everything on hand to make the things that are regulars in our home.

As I plan my meals, I also have a column on my form to note ingredients that will be needed for that recipe.  Once meals are planned, I turn that column into my shopping list, combining multiple items of the same thing to decide how much of what is needed and usually go grocery shopping on a Monday morning after meal planning.