Having a Game Plan
We live in a crazy busy society don’t we? We’ve all heard the statistics that family dinner time seems to be at an all time low with families stretched thin running in different directions to church events and sports practices. Getting dinner on the table can be tough in every season—with little ones who are grumpy at 4 pm, with big kids who have different evening practices and with work schedules varying. I began menu planning fairly early on in our marriage, before we had kids and I’m a huge advocate of having a rough plan in place when the week starts. I know if I do, we are much less likely to grab Chick Fil A at the last minute because we have no meat thawed or I have no idea what to cook. (Although that absolutely does still happen, just only like once or twice a month instead of weekly or umm…more than once a week! I also think having a plan in place really does invite me to be more hospitable. When I have a rough plan in place for the week, I’m much more likely to call up a friend or neighbor and say “hey we’re throwing turkey burgers on the grill in a couple of hours and I have some extras, do you want to come join us?” Or “I have this crock pot of chili already cooking and there’s no way we can eat it all—want to come help us?”
One of the things I get asked quite a bit by other moms, or that just comes up in conversation with other moms is the question of how to make menu planning as easy as possible. When I set out to think about the various topics I wanted to cover this month this one came to mind. I don't think it’s a super spiritual topic or one that is inspiring some deep reflection on life around the table, but I do think feeding our families regularly is part of life around the table. Life around the table doesn’t just mean special occasions or having guests, it also means establishing rhythms, routines, menus and a repertoire of favorite recipes we can easily feed those we live with on a regular basis.
I have friends who are incredibly anti-menu planning because they say they couldn’t possibly decide what is going to sound good four days in advance. These friends simply buy the same items each week and assemble meals from a pretty standard shopping list and it works great for them. But quite honestly, I know this doesn’t work for me. Without a plan in place at the start of a week I get a little stressed. Our afternoons are getting a bit shorter together as we now have one in school until 2:45 so if I want to spend quality time with him or take the kids to a playground or playdate after school I have to have dinner figured out before then. My kids are falling apart hungry by about 5:00 so I cannot wait until the 4:00 hour to decide I need to defrost something to cook, I have to know that morning what’s on the menu for that evening to avoid everyone having meltdowns (myself included!).
Everyone has a different menu planning method. Some do theirs by the week, others by the month. Everyone has different ways of narrowing down recipes and choosing what meals they'd like to make as well. I have gone through cycles over the years of how I go about this, but the method I’ve stuck with for a few years now is making a menu for a month at a time. Why? Because it honestly doesn’t take that much longer to do 4 weeks of menus at once, and I love having it done and out of the way. I still make a grocery list and shop each week for that week’s food but I have a rough plan in place for the whole month I can work with. If you stick with me for a few minutes I’ll hold your hand and walk you through a super simple, fail-proof method that I use and by the end of this blog post you can practically have an entire month’s worth of meals planned—I promise!
It can be overwhelming looking at the sheer numbers of recipes out there while trying to decide which ones to make. Thanks to the internet the possibilities are endless! I used to get completely overwhelmed with all the delicious looking recipes I’d come across on Pinterest or in cookbooks and that would almost paralyze me when it came to trying to menu plan. How do you choose 5-6 meals to make in a week when there are literally millions of options?! And more importantly, how do you know what’s even GOOD? I can’t even count how many new Pinterest recipes I’ve tried over the years that have been absolutely terrible. But if you sat down right now with a blank sheet of paper and set a timer for 5 minutes, I would bet you that you could come up with a list of recipes you already know your people enjoy. I call these “Brainless Crowd Pleasers” (I borrowed the term from Kendra at the Lazy Genius blog!). These are meals you already know how to make and you already know your people are generally pleased with. Go ahead, grab a sheet of paper—set a timer, I’ll wait, see what you come up with before you keep reading! Just for fun, here is a list of our family’s ‘brainless crowd pleaser’ recipes. Grilled Cheese & tomato soup night (yes this totally counts as a meal—I didn’t say you had to COOK elaborate meals every night! I sure don’t! I just try and get food on the table that everyone will actually eat!), Frozen pizzas, spaghetti & frozen meatballs, tacos, burritos, taco salad, enchiladas, meatloaf & mashed potatoes, ground turkey lettuce wraps, grilled burgers, grilled hot dogs, honey baked chicken, sweet and sour chicken, pitas with grilled chicken and veggies wrapped up, shrimp curry or shrimp scampi, Meatball subs, pesto pasta with chicken & veggies and chili with cornbread. These are just some of the meals I know everyone will mostly eat, that don’t require weird ingredients I don’t have on hand or require a ton of prep time. They’re easy and well…crowd pleasers. So go ahead, make your list, I promise it will help as we keep going!
Did you come up with some crowd pleasing meals? I literally have these written out in the front of my recipe binder so when it comes time to plan an actual menu a bulk of the recipes I’ll plan will come from this list. Our next step is plugging these meals into a calendar. You could totally just go down your list and assign them to days. But what I started doing years ago is looking at food in categories or “genres,” and this has really helped me. Each month when I sit down to make our menu I print out a blank calendar or use the monthly calendar in my planner and across the top up by the days of the week I assign a “genre” of food to each night. If I were to make a menu right now for November I might make every Sunday be a soup and bread night and every Monday be a pasta night and Tuesdays a Mexican-dish night (Taco Tuesday!) etc. That way when I go to fill in the actual recipe I want to make I have it narrowed down already. I choose four soups and fill those in on the 4 Sundays in the month. Maybe two of them will come from my list of brainless crowd pleasers (my people like chili and a soup called lasagna soup) and maybe 2 Sundays in the month I might want to try two new recipes I’ve come across. Boom. 4 Sunday night dinners planned. For Monday pasta nights I would probably make spaghetti and meatballs twice in the month because everyone loves it (brainless crowd pleaser!), and then might do a mac and cheese and a pesto chicken pasta for the two other Mondays. My 4 “Mexican dish” Tuesdays might be enchiladas, burritos, taco salad and nachos night. It honestly makes menu planning SO fast. What I love about this is I can change my categories based on the season and add in a ton of variety that way. In the summers every Saturday usually has some type of burger on the menu and maybe a night of different kinds of shish ka bobs. During seasons where we have sports or church things in the evening I might assign that night of the week to be a crock pot dish so dinner is ready when we get home—so I’ll look at my list of brainless crowd pleasers, see what could be made in a crock pot and plug those into that night of the week. Or I can do a search in my cookbooks or Pinterest for crock pot recipes. Each month I scan our calendar to see what our weeknights look like, decide what 5 categories of food I want to cook that month (two night a week are usually left blank for leftovers or eating out) and simply plug in which recipe sounds good. I know. Some of you are thinking I put WAY too much time into thinking about this but I promise it takes way longr to explain this than to actually do it. I can have a menu for an entire month made in about 10 minutes using my list of brainless crowd pleasers (which I’m always adding to as I find new recipes my people like) and using my meal “categories” to help narrow down the choosing. To me it's really fun coming up with new categories (and there are so many possibilities!), and then it makes my recipe choosing SO much easier because I've narrowed it down a bit (instead of looking at all my food pins on Pinterest I may only go to my "soup" board or the "sandwich" section of my latest cookbook).
Do I perfectly stick to this plan? Of course not. Life happens and we end up making the spaghetti on Sunday instead of Monday and that’s FINE! But the point for me at least is having a plan in place and knowing at the start of the week I have all the ingredients on hand to make these 5 meals. I can move them around on my calendar as life changes but at least I’m not scrambling at 4:30 and I am not running to the grocery store for last minute items if I have a plan in place.
I certainly am not perfect at this, and there are months we eat out way more than we should, but having a plan in place helps my sanity, our budget, and keeps us gathering around our dinner table as a family most nights. Does meal planning overwhelm you? Maybe try this method for a month or two and see if it works for you. Need a list of meal categories? I’ve included a big list for you! Want to see how it plays out or just steal our family's menu for the month of November 2017? I’ve included that below too. No matter what method you use to help figure out what to feed your family, just remember, the point isn’t a perfect plan or perfectly adhering to the plan. The point is simply creating an easy path to getting your family to the dinner table to reconnect after a busy day.
And now, without further ado, here are some lists you are welcome to borrow to create a monthly menu for your own family!
Categories I’ve used Depending on Seasons:
Soup, Sandwiches, Meat & Potatoes, Pasta, Mexican Inspired, Pizza Night, Chicken night, Seafood night, Grill Out, Asian night (lettuce wraps, stir fry, orange chicken or sweet and sour chicken), Shish Ka Bob nights (so many different ways to make these), Ground beef nights (sloppy joes, meatloaf, burgers, however you like to use ground beef!) Vegetarian night, breakfast for dinner night, cook from a favorite cookbook night (choose 4 recipes from the latest Pioneer Woman book for instance!), Burger night (teriyaki burgers, turkey burgers, regular bbq burgers), Salad Bar nights (make a hearty meal-worthy salad one night each week), Crock Pot Nights, Pork Tenderloin nights (pork is SO easy to cook and each week could be a different marinade, so easy and delicious).
Here’s what we’re eating in November. I only plan main dishes and then get a variety of salad stuff and in-season vegetables or fruit to pair with each meal, so that part just depends on what looks good in the store. If you click on the recipe it will take you to the recipe itself so feel free to borrow! Let me know if you try any of these & what your family thought!
Sunday Soup Night (I love soup but it often takes awhile to prep ingredients and simmer so I tend to plan soup nights for weekends when I’m home more)
Mondays Pasta: (AKA, daddy is gone each Monday evening and I need a meal I know these kids will eat with zero complaints. Noodles are always their favorite!)
Spaghetti & Meatballs (I have no recipe, I use frozen meatballs and jars of sauce!)
Tuesday Sandwiches:
Meatball Subs (I made these on a whim for my family last year and you seriously would have thought I was a celebrity chef. I literally cooked frozen meatballs in sauce, put them on hoagie rolls, sprinkled with mozzarella and broiled for a few minutes. And they said it was the best thing I’ve ever made.)
Grilled cheese & tomato soup
Wednesday Leftovers—does this mean we do leftovers every Wednesday? No. Sometimes we don’t have any in which case I’ll cook Thursday’s meal on Wednesday & we’ll do leftovers on Thursday. The point isn’t to strictly follow the schedule, it’s simply to know you have the ingredients for at least 5 home cooked meals in your pantry when the week starts. Which night you actually cook which recipe is up to you!
Thursday Chicken Night:
Friday Seafood:
Coconut Shrimp Curry (my kids LOVE this if I make it a little less spicy than the recipe calls for)
Coconut Crusted Tilapia (this was also a HUGE hit with my kids, I didn't have enough, they ate mine when their portions were done--if you have a non-fish eater try these, they are just like chicken tenders)
Saturday: We usually eat out somewhere or we’ll have friends over in which case I’ll cook whatever we have on hand or whatever our families decide to make together.
Happy Menu Planning my friends!
