Momma, why are you always harping about meal planning? Pull up a chair, then grab yourself a fuzzy blanket and a mug of hot cocoa. Let’s have a talk. (Don’t do these things if it’s summer. Kick off your shoes and get a cold glass of lemonade.)
What is Meal Planning?
Simply put, meal planning is the process of planning out what your meals will be for a set period of time. Many people work in one week increments, to avoid spoilage of perishable items. Two-week and one-month plans are also fairly common. The general process flows something like this…
Meal Plan Steps:
Step 1: Take an inventory of what’s available in the house, making a note of anything that needs to be cooked before it spoils.
Step 2: Look at your current schedule. This includes work, volunteering, planned outings, social events, etc. Determine how many of each meal you need to account for.
Step 3: Make a list of what meals you would like to eat for the time period being planned for. Making choices that use the ingredients listed in step one helps reduce food waste and saves money.
Step 4: Put the meals onto a blank scheduling page or calendar, making sure to work in variety so you’re not stuck eating eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a single day. Some shuffling may be required. Working in pencil is ideal. Also, do not plan to make beef bourguignon (a two-hour cook) on the day you’re scheduled for a 12 hour work shift.
Step 5: Review the recipes and note any ingredients not present in the house that need to be purchased. Grocery shop in whichever manner works best for your lifestyle, schedule, and impulse control.
Why is meal planning important?
If you’ve ever gone into the grocery with $50 and come out an hour later with not a lot of anything for an actual meal, you probably already know that meal planning is probably important. Not probably. It is, as I learned from personal experience. As a newly married, very young wife, I had exactly $25 a week to buy groceries for the both of us. I had no idea what I was doing and had to learn the hard way real fast how to make that money stretch and still actually feed two adults.
When you’re trying to get your money and spending under control, the food line item is almost invariably the area where there is the most flexibility to make changes that will impact your overall financial health. Food can be one of the most expensive costs for you every month. Or, with some time spent planning ahead, it can be the one place you can breathe easy and buy yourself some margin for other expenses. Like heat during a week-long iceout.
Benefits of meal planning:
- Adequate nutrition: Let’s face it, we all have gaps in our daily diets. Not enough veggies or too many potato chips. Meal planning helps you see where the gaps and excesses are. Then you can adjust and add a leafy green salad to a meal and cut back to only half a family-sized bag of cheez-puffs for your afternoon snack.
- Less food waste: If you’ve ever had a bag of salad turn to brown liquid when it vanished into the wasteland found in the back of the fridge, let this be reassurance for you. If you’ve got a meal plan laid out, you’ll remember that yes you did buy salad for pasta night, and send out Search and Rescue before it expires neglected and forgotten by that last dribble of gravy left from Thanksgiving. (Seriously, throw that out already.) With a plan in place, you won’t be buying perishable stuff that you have good intentions of using, that instead ends up in the garbage.
- Time savings: Before you ask… Yes, meal planning does take some time. But that small time investment is so much less than the kickback you get from making the plan. There’s less time spent last minute dithering on what to do with the half-head of cabbage and pound of sausage. Less time spent scuttling back and forth from the grocery to pick up a missing ingredient when you do figure out what you’re going to make. Then the next night, then the night after that.
- Money savings: This is what we’re really here for, right? Saving money on food. With a plan in place, you can build a shopping list and stick to it. Heck, you can put in a grocery pickup order and avoid the temptations of expensive extras on the endcaps. When you buy that head of cabbage, you’ll know one half is for a delicious warming soup, then the rest will be used to make slaw for your fish tacos. You won’t be buying more than you need. And you won’t be dropping an extra $2 every night for a soda out of the cold case in the front of the store. (Because you’ll have already bought the six-pack and have a cold beverage waiting for you in the fridge.) Not to mention because you know the food’s lined up at home, you’re less likely to swing into a drive thru last minute on your way home.
- Stress reduction: There’s this thing called Decision Fatigue. We all experience it and it usually falls at the end of the day. Whether you’re a full-time student, a full-time employee, or (Lord help you) both at the same time, you will hit the end of your rope. It usually hits right about the time you actually have to make another vital decision: what’s for dinner? If you have a meal plan in place, that decision is already made for you and you can move right on along to the happy part… the eating!
What’s the Difference Between Meal Planning and Meal Prep?
Let’s think of Meal Planning and Meal Prep as something like fraternal twins. Very similar and closely related, but not the same entity. Meal Planning is… well, the planning end of figuring out what’s for dinner. Meal Prep is the execution side of things. This is tricky waters because there’s Meal Preparation the Actually-Making-the-Food that comes with cooking in general. Then there is Meal Prep the Method which involves making all the food in advance and eating it later in the week. To pull off that particular method involves, you guessed it, planning!
Different types of meal planning:
Weekly/Monthly planning: This is arguably the most common form of meal planning, or at least the one that most people tend to be familiar with. You plan out all your meals for the coming week (or month), then shop the ingredients. That’s what’s on the menu this week. The challenge comes in how many people you’re trying to feed (and please), how likely they are to snack your ingredients (that cheese was for enchiladas, folks!), dodging food allergies or aversions, and not eating chicken 8 meals in a row.
There is a version of this that involves monthly planning. With this, yes you plan out all your meals for the coming month. Ideally, you prep them, after they’ve been shopped, and put them in the freezer until it’s time to eat them. This is not at all advised for households with wildly variable schedules, or tightly limited budgets.
Rotating menu: One of the easiest on the list. You make a meal plan of meals you don’t mind eating on the regular. Then you rotate through that menu, starting over again at the top when you’ve reached the end. I tend to make mine for two weeks before repeating. The benefit here is not having to plan and replan and plan again every week. Once it’s done, it’s done. The challenge is having enough variety of meals you enjoy that you’re not sick of them by the time you’ve looped around again.
Pantry cooking: This one can be fun, especially if you’re a fan of cooking competition shows. “What can I make with this mish-mash of food I already have?!” Essentially you look at what you have stashed in your pantry and intentionally plan meals to use these items. If this sounds like the beginning of meal planning, you’re right, it does. But the addition here is that you’ve historically been adding food to the pantry so you have ingredients at hand for things that you enjoy making. I always keep pasta and sauce stocked, and replenish when it’s used. Same for bean burrito making.
Mix-and-Match: In this planning method, you don’t have a stack of recipes to learn. This is the bare bones simple cooking, preferably that you already know how to do. You have a list of proteins, starches, veggies and fruits. List the ones you have planned for the week on your fridge and cross them off as you use them. Then you pick one of each category and that’s the meal. So grilled chicken, couscous and green beans; then ham, mashed potatoes, and peas; next fish filet, mac n cheese and broccoli. It’s not fancy and probably not Instagram fodder, but it’s nutrition and best of all, it’s minimal decision involved.
Meal Prep: This can be somewhat similar to the mix-and-match and weekly methods. In this one, you plan out all the meals for the week with the intention of cooking them all in one session. Once done, meals are portioned out into containers to be reheated throughout the week. Foods can be preemptively combined into the meals, or stored individually and used as the mood strikes. It’s a little extra effort on the front end, but saves you time later in the week when you can just grab dinner and eat.
Batch cooking: This one has different subsets of batch cooking. First there’s Doubling. You plan to make chili. You double the recipe with the intention of freezing one half and having it ready to go another week. Next is Bulk Cooking. With this one, you’re cooking something in bulk with the intention of using it in the coming week (or freezing for later). So when the 10 pound bag of chicken leg quarters goes on sale for $4.90, you plan for cooking the whole bag and using the meat across your week’s meals. Another subset is Freezer Cooking. With this version, you cook multiple batches of a meal, for example chicken enchiladas, and freeze them for later consumption.
Freezer Meals: Have I already talked about freezing things? Why yes, but this is something a little different. This is a smaller scale version of bulk cooking, where instead of stocking your pantry, you stock your freezer with meals you’ve made. (Examples: pulled pork plate, lasagna, pot pie). Grab a meal, thaw, reheat, then eat. Another variety of it is the Freezer Bags Method, where you toss ingredients, say for chicken tortilla soup in a ziplock bag, and freeze them until you’re ready to thaw and cook. It’s arguably a little fresher in this method, but will take more time than simply thaw and reheat.
Which style of meal planning fits your needs?
Honestly? This is going to be subjective and personal to you and your life. I know it’s not as sexy as “I am XYZ Type and that means I need ABC Method.” But we can talk through some general life challenges and which plans are more likely to be well suited for them.
If you have a set work schedule every week: Rotating Meal Plan, Weekly Planning, Batch Cooking
If you pull 60 hour weeks: Freezer Meals, Batch Cooking, Meal Prep
If your schedule changes from week to week: Weekly Planning, Mix-and-Match
If you get paid once a month: Monthly Planning, Freezer Meals
If you like the challenge of new recipes: Pantry Cooking
If you hate cooking and just want to eat: Mix-and-Match, Rotating Menu, Freezer Meals
If your income varies and/or is irregular: Pantry Cooking, Batch Cooking, Freezer Meals
If you’ve stayed with me this long, thanks! I really hope you’ve learned a lot about meal planning and why it’s so important for your ongoing financial health. If you have unanswered questions, ask ‘em in the comments and I’ll get ya sorted.
Which method works best for you? A single one or a combination of multiples? Let me know!
Eat well, Momma
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