Meal Planning

Food. Food. Food. Food. Food.

Feeding our families is both housekeeping and a domestic art. It is culture, comfort, and nutrition. It is overwhelming, one of the daily chores, repetitive, love made visible, soul-affecting, creation. It is decision-making and crafting.

“It’s not just food, all right? Some people could look at it and see just food, but not me. I see art. When I’m in the kitchen, I’m – I’m creating something out of nothing.” – Eliot Spencer, Leverage.

Creating a meal, a dish, something to feed our families is art. It’s another form of sub-creation. It is a beautiful and wonderful gift we give our families every day. But to be able to present this gift we must create a good support structure. We must have ingredients, and recipes, and grow our skills. All art is this way. If you wish to write, it’s important to learn grammar, story structure, human psychology, and to sit your butt down and write. If you paint, you need… well… paint, canvas, practice, and inspiration. All art must have ordinary structures that support it.

That is meal planning. Meal planning is the structure behind the art.

Meal Planning: When you sit down and design the menu for whatever designated time frame (Weekly, Bi-Monthly, Monthly) and then shop your pantry and the local grocery store for the necessary ingredients.

There are any number of plans, apps, calendars, books, blogs, and podcasts that can give us practical help. Other women in our knitting circle can give you ideas, tips, and tricks. Our HK Chat is full of “this is how I do it” information. My personal experience was one of starting out super detailed with lots of printouts utilizing one person’s system. I slowly adjusted and cherry-picked from other sources until I found what worked for me.

A big part of meal planning is patiently figuring out the problems unique to your home and the solutions to those problems.

Example: Part of my chronic health issues involve brain fog. My brain just isn’t reliable. I’ve created many a system to make sure things don’t get lost. I kept bumping into this problem where the grocery store wouldn’t have an ingredient I needed but I couldn’t choose a substitute because I couldn’t remember what the ingredient was for in the first place. I fixed this by getting a notebook with both the menu and the shopping list side by side. Now I know what I’m cooking and can make an appropriate selection.

Identify the problem for your home and work towards a solution.

Several things can help make meal planning easier:

·        Recipes: You need to know what you and yours enjoy eating. This can be added to and updated regularly. You want enough recipes to keep things from stagnating, but not so many that you get overwhelmed. It can be helpful to have the list divided up by cookbook, type of recipe (easy, big batch, dinner, dessert), and season.

·        Pantry Inventory: Know your pantry inventory. Shopping it first will save you time, money, and mental and physical energy. Use what you buy. Easy visual access to your pantry is important. If you can’t see what you have you’ll waste money and ingredients. If you are so inclined, spreadsheets can be a helpful way to track what you have.

·        Tools: Experiment until you find an app or notebook you enjoy using. Some of us will have everything on our phones, some on pen and paper. Find what works for you, your brain, and your circumstances.

Elements of meal planning:

·        Schedule: Be aware of who, what, where, and when each meal is going to be eaten. Meal planning not only helps you feed your family, but it also helps you keep a pulse on your home in general.

·        Types: As said above, you want a variety of types of meals. Heavy meals, light meals, warm meals and cold meals, quick and easy, big batch, ones that can freeze, ones that can share, and obviously ones your whole family loves.

·        Labor: With each meal you select, you want to be aware of the amount of time and effort the meal requires. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by picking several labor-intensive meals in a row, but don’t skimp out by only ever doing the easiest meal. You and your family need a bit of both.

·        Ingredients: Look for recipes and meals that use similar ingredients so that you save time and money. You will want to test new recipes periodically but stagger that so you don’t blow your whole food budget on that one fun thing from Pinterest. Cooking the same meals on rotation helps you manage your pantry and your budget.

·        Nutrition/Comfort: It’s important that we balance these two sides of food. Not everything needs to be nutritious. We aren’t machines fueling up, but nutrition affects everything. We need to take ownership of incorporating comfort and nutrition. Look for recipes that are both as much as possible, but also don’t be afraid to bake cookies. We have to take care of our bodies, but also richly enjoy all that the Lord has put here for us.

·        Cookbooks: Try cooking from a handful of cookbooks instead of just pulling random recipes from Pinterest. Find a blogger you love and cook through her whole work. What you will find is that many of these resources mix and match ingredients. You’ll gain skill and confidence by working through the chef’s systems. You will save money. My cooking skills skyrocketed when I quit just scouring Pinterest and switched to cookbooks. It can also help with feeling overwhelmed by choices. Pick one book and you will have a limited number of dishes, sides, desserts, and snacks. Now, I’m not saying never use Pinterest. I’m sure many of you do and have basically curated your own cookbooks. I’m suggesting that if you’re struggling in this area, get offline and cook through a cookbook.

·        Kitchen Journal: A huge way to help yourself is to collect all your lists and loose recipes in one location. This can be a digital cookbook on Excel, an app, or a physical notebook on your shelf. Make it pretty. Keep it organized. Sort through it regularly but keeping things together will make the actual act of meal planning much easier.

·        Limit Options: Typically, the only meal I really have to plan is dinner. Breakfast is pretty much one of three things and lunch is leftovers or a sandwich. You will make yourself and your family miserable if you have too many options. Routine foods become comfort foods. They also help you not get into decision paralysis. Don’t feel like you must have something new at every meal.

What are some of the benefits of meal planning?

·        Savings: Meal Planning will save you money in the long run because you will know what's coming and what to feed your people. You will be less likely to order in or turn to junk food (which is more expensive) or buy random ingredients never to be used again. Meal planning keeps you ahead of the game.

·        Calm: We can save ourselves a lot of anxiety and prevent a lot of anxiety in our homes if we can confidently tell everyone what is for dinner. No question, no hesitation, just this is it. Everyone, including ourselves, is calm. It also helps us get things out of the freezer so that we don’t have that end-of-day panic. When we sit down to meal plan, we can also plan meal prepping. If you know you’re having such and such on Wednesday, you also know you need to get meat out of the freezer and chop that onion.

·        Management: As the HearthKeepers, we can grow our skills as managers of the home by meal planning. We’ll know our freezer meals, our hospitality abilities, and our family favorites. Meal planning gives us a sense of what is actually happening in our home on multiple levels. Are we always eating tacos? Do we use our freezer? Do we need a bigger freezer? Is everyone getting enough fruits and veggies? On, and on, and on. Meal planning helps us gain control over our homes both by instinct and with tangible knowledge. It can even help us judge if life is too busy. If we’ve only eaten freezer meals and easy meals for the last two weeks, it might be time to say no to a few things.

Meal planning is an important skill to learn as a homemaker. Start somewhere and patiently playtest until you find a system that works for you. Not meal planning leaves you open to waste and excessive spending, frustration and anxiety, and blind to what is happening in your home. Take the time to develop this skill. I know I didn’t give a practical step-by-step guide. That’s because the world is filled with that information already. Get on Pinterest, google it, or look for aids on Etsy and Amazon and your app store. Find a book and study it. A great one to try is Home Management Plain and Simple by Kim Brenneman. A thousand different systems are at your fingertips.  Pick one, try it for several weeks, and then start tweaking. Take note of mistakes, pain points, and problems, then start working on a solution. Your home is both the same as everyone else and also unique, so you have to customize whatever plan you land on.

If you’re a veteran meal planner, you might want to also do a bit of exploring and see if you can tighten up in any areas or add some new skills. Or you might be feeling dull and need to beautify your system a bit. Freshening notebooks can be a great way to get back in the game and regain some excitement. A new cookbook can do this too or taking a cooking class. If you’re feeling bored or burnt out, hit the library, borrow a cookbook, ask for new recipes, or up your skill.

Meal planning is a necessary and effective way to turn one of our biggest jobs into a well-oiled and even fun machine. It is worth the work and has many unseen benefits besides just a smoother mealtime. Don’t skip this important skill, but make sure you make it work for your home with time, patience, and playtesting.