Meal Planning

Remember back when I used to only post about food? Yeah, it's been awhile. I've still been diligently taking photos of the food we make and eat, and will share some of my favorites in my next post, but first I want to share with you all our process of meal planning because I think it may help to make cooking more approachable and eating balanced meals easier.

I became a proponent of meal planning during our first CSA season because it helped us to make sure we were going to use all of our veggies. I've mentioned this before, but I absolutely hate wasting food - I feel bad for the food we throw away in much the same way that I felt bad for toys I didn't play with anymore as a child. Probably the reason that I still sleep with a teddy bear too. Anyway, since starting meal planning, I honestly can't fathom how one cooks and grocery shops efficiently without it. Because I love meal planning so much, I thought I'd devote a post to our system. I know some of you are thinking - there's no way I could meal plan, I'm not organized enough, and I'd never want to lock myself into eating a certain meal every day, but just TRY it for a few weeks - I felt the same way and will never look back.

Why meal plan?

There are a number of reasons to meal plan. For us, one of the big reasons is because we like to try a whole bunch of different meals instead of just relying on the same 5-10 recipes in a rotation. This is primarily me more so than Ben. We try to have a good balance of meals throughout the week too - maybe pasta one night, vegetarian a few nights, chicken one night, and no two similar meals back to back. It helps you waste less time and money at the grocery store buying random crap (like those boxes of rice a roni that expired 3 years ago), helps ensure that you eat somewhat balanced meals, and eliminates the frantic feeling of not knowing what to cook when you get home from work. I feel there is more pressure when you're responsible for another being who you don't want to eat cereal and cheese every night, but meal planning is valuable for EVERYONE, even if you're living alone. Many meals freeze well, so you can make a batch, have some for lunches, and freeze the rest. I could go on and on, but will leave it at that - namely: saves time, helps you stay healthy, saves money.

How do we find recipes?

As previously mentioned, I read a lot of cooking blogs. To be precise, 53, and there used to be many more before I went on a mad spree of unsubscribing after being completely overwhelmed with blogs after having Annie. I have them in a "Cooking" category on my google reader, and while I might read a post that catches my eye in the "Recently posted" homepage once and awhile, often I leave them until I'm bored one night and just blow through like 200 posts in a night by quickly scanning titles to see if I'm remotely interested in the dish. If I am, I read the entire post, and if it sounds like something I'd want to make, I star it. That's it - some people categorize, but I don't. That's how I find recipes - Ben usually just googles things the day he wants to make something and looks through them until he finds one he likes. He'll have a general idea and then go from there.

A few of my very favorite cooking blogs:

Annie's Eats - who wrote an awesome post about her meal planning method here.

A Couple Cooks

The Way The Cookie Crumbles

Weelicious (this is specifically a baby/toddler food blog but has recipes the whole family can eat which is perfect for us right now!)

Simply Recipes

Elly Says Opa

Pioneer Woman Cooks (although I use this less now that I actually feel pressure to make things "healthy")

Logistics

Now, on to how we actually write up the meal plan. It usually happens on either Saturday or Sunday and almost always is initiated by Ben by him saying: "hey, let's plan some meals". This is usually done while Annie is playing in the morning. We first start by thinking about if there is anything specific we need to use up from the fridge or freezer and try to incorporate that into our meal plan. We should be better about doing this, actually, but usually we remember. If we have a specific ingredient, I search for that ingredient through my starred items in Google Reader to see what comes up - this is where I begin to hate blogs with truncated feeds that don't all show up in Google Reader. I use this searching technique a lot to get recipe ideas, searching for things like: chicken, vegetarian, black beans, mexican, pasta, spinach, soup, crockpot just to name a few. We look at the calendar for the week to see what nights we actually need to cook, and usually plan 5 meals total for the week because we know something will come up inevitably and we'll need to move one meal back, or we'll want to go out one night. I also try to think about using some items multiple times, for example cilantro, parsley, or carrots, which are rarely used up in one dish. As I mentioned previously, we try to not eat too many similar meals, and maintain balance of types of protein and general healthiness of the meals.

For those of you who are into the old fashioned paper and pencil approach to meal planning, check out this post over at Navigating the Mothership.

Using Google Calendar

Ben and I have been using Google Calendar to manage our super active social lives for several years now. Ben converted me awhile ago, it took me awhile to actually admit to liking his suggestion, but I shoved my pride aside and went with it. We have multiple calendars - my personal calendar, Ben's personal calendar, a family calendar of things we all do because I didn't like things we both did showing up side-by-side if it was on both of our calendars, and a meals calendar. I like them to all be different colors, so activities I have to do are all blue, meals are purple, and Ben's calendar is green. I don't know how I set this all up, but I am sure Googling "setting up multiple calendars with different colors in Google Calendar" will pull up some informative results. Once we've decided on a meal, one of us enters it into the calendar as an "all day" event, so it shows up on the top of the day. We try to remember to put the recipe in the "location" or "description" field so we have handy access to it later - a bonus of doing this is that you can easily pull up the recipe on your smart phone if you have one. This also makes it really easy for us to just swap around meals if we for some reason can't or don't feel like making what we originally planned for a night. Here are a few examples of recent weeks (click on the photo to view larger):

Grocery shopping

We do most of our grocery shopping at Whole Foods, and use the Grocery IQ app on our iPhones to manage our grocery list. Ben picked that one because of reviews or something, but it allows us to both share our lists with each other, so if one person is at the store and the other thinks of something, they can just add it to the list. We also just add things to the list when we notice we're out. You can have multiple stores in there too, so for all the processed food goodies I love, I put those on the Rainbow list for the next time we're there. After we've got the meal plan nailed down, we go through each recipe and add all the things we need to our list. The main reason we meal plan is so we only have to go grocery shopping once during the week. Sometimes we forget stuff or find out we need something else and have to make a 2nd trip, but it's not a major one and that is rare. We do have a well stocked pantry by this time so most of what we need is produce and other perishable items, and to re-stock our pantry and freezer if necessary with things like beans, canned tomatoes, oils, vinegars, spices, etc.

In the next post, I'll actually share a few of our meal plans and will also share meals that have been a particularly big hit with Annie for you fellow moms of toddlers out there. I hope this was helpful to someone, and if you have any tips or have written a similar post on meal planning on your own blog, please comment!