Make Simple Meal Plans and Grocery Lists

 I could go on forever about meal planning, cooking, shopping, etc. But the goal of this lesson is to help you streamline your kitchen experience by helping you plan simple meals that you can rely on for the time that you’re going to be working through this class. 

Getting better at homemaking takes some real effort, and we’ve got to carve that time out. Cooking can be a big time commitment if you’re a from-scratch purist like me, but it doesn’t have to be. Either way, planning is how you achieve good home cooking. 

There are LOTS of great ideas out there on how to meal plan. Here are the trends I see in what’s actually effective for our purposes:

• The plans focus on meals that the family likes and the the family chef is familiar with. New recipes are fun, but trying a new recipe too frequently is hard on the chef and the family.
• The plan is adjustable to meet seasonal changes, what’s on sale, and family dietary needs.
• The plan includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
• The plan focuses on meals that are not time consuming for the chef. If you’re into cooking and have skills, making a multi-course meal may not be that time consuming. If not, meals like spaghetti with bottled sauce and a bagged salad are the way to go. 
• The plan includes a regular break for the chef in the form of leftover night, takeout night, freezer meal night, or someone-else-is-cooking night. 
• The plan translates to a grocery list that is organized by sections in the grocery store. No more grocery-cart derby while you go back to isle five for the sixth time. You know what I’m talking about.

With these attributes of good meal planning in mind, here are some simple steps to getting started on your own meal plans:

Step 1: Make a big list of meals

Think of all the meals that you like to cook, that your family likes to eat (not always the same as what you like to cook), what you like to eat, what you want to get into eating more of, you get the idea. Just list them all. Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Ask your family for ideas.

Step 2: Sort the list by prep time and food base

Looking at your list, pull out all the really easy meals and put them together. Do this also for the meals that take more work. Then, sort each of these lists by the base food that makes up the meal: for me, this is usually the carb or the protein. So I’ll have a list of easy bean dishes, easy chicken dishes, easy pasta dishes, easy rice dishes, etc. Do the same with the stuff that’s more involved. 

Notice what makes your more challenging meals more challenging. Can you simplify the meal to achieve a similar result? For example, I love chicken pot pie, but making a pie crust takes and chopping the vegetables and making a white sauce from scratch takes a lot of time (for me). So how can I simplify? I don’t like pre-made pie crusts, but if I did, that could be a great option. Could I make the pie filling and put it on a baked potato or rice or even pasta instead? How about using a bag of frozen vegetables instead of chopping everything myself? What about using cream of chicken soup from a can or box instead of making my own white sauce? These kinds of tweaks to more time-consuming recipes can make some of your favorite but difficult recipes more achievable. No, it won’t taste the same as the amazing completely from-scratch version, but it may still be quite delicious. 

Step 3: Make a place to write your plan on a regular basis

Some people have places in their planners that they write their meals. Some people put their plan on the refridgerator. Some people are completely digital and write it on their google calendars. It doesn’t matter. Just write down your plan in a place where you’ll see it before you go grocery shopping and before you start cooking anything. 

Mine typically looks like this table:

	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday
Breakfast	10 Grain	Rice cereal	Sourdough Pancakes	Leftover pancakes	Eggs and hashbrowns	10 grain	Eggs and toast
Lunch	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers
Dinner	Uncle Chris's soup	Pinto beans and rice	Clam chowder	Pasta with tomato and cheese	Oven-fried chicken and mashed potatoes (with giblet gravy?)	Tomato soup	Meatloaf and rice	Beef and Barley Soup
To Do
	Start broth--beef	Grind and soak soft white wheat	Thaw clams and clam juice	Thaw chicken	Start broth--chicken	refresh broth	Groceries and Meal planning	thaw barley
	Soak beans	Make giant salad	Make cauliflower/carrot pickles				refresh broth	Thaw beef
	Thaw beans	Prep start for bread and pancakes?	Refresh broth
	Soak rice	Grind flour	Freeze broth for beef and barley soup
		Mix bread	Make pancakes
		refresh broth	Bake bread

You’ll notice that my plan includes a to do list. If you’re cooking a lot from scratch, using stuff from the freezer, pre-soaking beans or grains, or are a nutcase like me and enjoy doing your own sourdough bread, sometimes you need to start preparing your meals well in advance--even a few days in advance. Having that “to do list” to remind you to pull out the chicken to thaw the day before you’re going to use it is really helpful. 

The only thing this plan does not demonstrate well is a break for the chef. One night should be a crock pot meal, or a leftovers night, or going out to eat, or something like that. I really feel that the chef or the family of chefs ought to have one night off on a regular basis. If you can afford to eat out regularly, try new foods and places where you can get ideas of what to cook when you are at home. Eating out is a great way to expand your food horizons. We all get stuck in that rut of things we always cook. 

If you’re trying to expand your list of cook-at-home meals, another great idea is to throw in one night where you try a new recipe on a regular basis. Just make sure you’ve got a calm evening or afternoon where you have the time you need to get into a new cooking project. New recipes, even for simple meals, always take more time the first time you try them. 

Step 4: Plan on a regular basis

For a long time, Thursday was my shopping day. I would do all my grocery shopping once a week. I highly recommend shopping as infrequently as possible, unless you really enjoy it. Some people shop much less frequently than once a week, but for my family, because we need so much fresh produce, once a week is about the longest we can go. 

Since I always shopped on Thursdays, I would plan meals and check out sales on Wednesdays. That’s why my meal plan goes from Thursday to Thursday. Do whatever works for you. 

When making the week’s meal plan, consider 

• the giant list of meals you generated. This list can help you stay out of the “food rut” we all get stuck in from time to time. 
• your schedule and events. If you’re keeping your calendar nearby while planning (and you should be!) you’ll avoid trying to pull of something ambitious and time-consuming (like home-made everything from scratch chicken pot pies) on Tuesday nights when you’re supposed to be running the cub scout pack meeting. You’ll also be more likely to remember it’s your spouse’s birthday on Wednesday and you want to cook something special that day. Plan meals with your bigger life plan in mind. 
• food you’ve already got on hand. Start the grocery shopping in your own house. Look through the freezer, fridge, pantry, and that place under the bed where you keep food storage. What needs to be used up? Work that stuff into your plan. If you’re planning well, you can consistently build and draw on bulk food storage (it saves lots of money to buy and use staples like rice and beans and wheat in bulk). With good planning, you can also make certain more expensive items stretch. That free-range, grass-fed, perfectly pampered organic whole chicken ($$$) can be roasted Sunday, used for sandwiches or in a curry on Monday, and turned into bone-broth for soup on Tuesday and Wednesday. That kind of cooking saves time and money, but it just doesn’t happen without a plan.
• what’s on sale right now. I have our grocery store’s sales bookmarked on my web browser for easy reference when I’m meal planning, but you may want to use those mailers or coupons or whatever. Planning around sales is a great way to save money and enjoy seasonal foods, since what’s in season is often what’s on sale. 
• changes in weather and mood. Some people, like my mom, don’t like having things planned out in so much detail, but still have a very workable meal plan. My mom just makes a list of the meals she wants to make that week and then looks at it before she starts cooking anything. She’ll decide a few hours before dinner what sounds good to her to make and eat that day, and then, because she bought the ingredients her plan needed in advance, she can cook up whatever she wants from her plan that night. 

Do what works for you. 

The point is, make a plan. It will help you know what to buy and what to cook. It will help prevent food waste and keep you from having fast food for dinner more often than you should. Your health and your budget will thank you.

Now, if you can afford it, there are lots of meal planning services and apps and things like that out there that can take care of a lot of this aspect of life for you for a little or a large price, depending on all the services you decide to buy. This option seems like a great idea to me if you’re interested in trying new recipes or further simplifying your kitchen experience so you can use that time elsewhere. But if, like me, you’ve got more time than funding, the method I’ve shared or any of those myriad other excellent meal planning methods out there will still help you streamline your cooking and your grocery shopping experience. 

Step 5: Shop for what your plan calls for

Once you’ve got a plan, you can go shopping! Make your life easier by organizing your shopping list by grocery store sections, like “produce” “dairy” “meat” “dry goods” “paper goods” etc. This may seem like it would take more time, but if you set up a sheet for yourself, either digitally or in print, you’ll end up saving a ton of time and legwork at the grocery store. 

Tip: If you’re in a particularly busy time of life, and if you’re planning on taking the rest of this course, I recommend focusing your meal plans on very simple meals, at least until you’ve simplified other areas of your life enough to get more time back for cooking. 

Homework: Try meal planning and an organized shopping list this week.