Call me obsessive. Call me organized. Call me whatever you’d like. I call it keeping my sanity!
Meal planning is one of my favorite ways to stay organized throughout the week. Organizing meals not only helps me build my grocery list, but allows me to use what’s in the pantry and fridge first, so that we aren’t wasting food. It also motivates me to cook more well-balanced (and yummy!) meals throughout the week. I’m not going to lie, I LOVE pizza. I don’t need any extra excuses for carry-out, and meal planning definitely helps hold me accountable.
For our house, I meal plan and grocery shop once a week. Lately, I’ve even been planning it down to the snacks that we are eating throughout the day. Although I don’t have specific numbers, I can say that I have noticed that we have been saving money this way. Planning snacks also works out well because Hubs is on a special eating plan that emphasizes the balance between proteins, complex carbs, and fibrous veggies, so his snack choices matter more than ever. This helps him stay on track and helps me as I prepare them each day.
I started meal planning the good ‘ol fashioned way—pen and paper! Recently though, I’ve found some helpful tools that have shaped the way that I’ve been doing my meal planning. The first (and most low-tech) is this cute little meal planning notepad. This notepad is so convenient because I can toss it in my purse and work on it whenever I have time. I get the proverbial ants-in-the-pants pretty easily, so it’s nice to have something useful to keep me busy. After I’ve planned our meals for the week, I hang the page on the refrigerator so that Hubs doesn’t ask me “What’s for dinner?” over and over and over and over……Wives, you understand where I’m coming from, right?! The notepad pictured below is from the Target dollar bin, but you can find some other inexpensive and cute ones here or even here.
Another favorite meal planning tool that I have found is a free iPhone app called Meal Maker.
This app allows you to create meals (including their ingredients) and save them as recipes. As you enter meals for each day, they can be saved and added to another day with a simple click. Meal Maker also allows you to easily and quickly build grocery lists within the app, which later can be emailed (Pssst, wives….GREAT way to get your husbands to do the grocery shopping!). As if all of these features aren’t cool enough, the best part of Meal Maker is the lack of creativity it allows me to have on days that meal planning isn’t going so well. Once meals are saved as recipes, you can easily look through the list of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that you’ve compiled over the weeks and create your plan with a couple taps on the screen. Who said it had to be hard?
Diary of a Domesticated Diva 