The Single Most Important Step To Successful Meal Planning

Have you ever wandered around the grocery store, spent $100 you don’t really have, and get home to find that you still don’t have anything you can make for dinner in time to get son #1 to soccer practice? What do you do? Load everyone up and hit the local, cheap, Mexican restaurant for the third time this week.

Is that a familiar scenario for anyone but me? I calculated that I spent close to $2400 a year eating out at the cheap and fast places because I didn’t have a plan that enabled us to successfully eat at home. Not so cheap after all.

We have already talked about WHY we need to make eating at home, as a family, a priority. Now, let’s dig in to HOW to set yourself up for success instead of failure.

The single most important step in successful meal planning is not just having food in the house. You can have food and still not be able to put a meal on the table.

The single most important step is to get your stuff organized. If you aren’t organized, meal planning will be frustrating and boring. Get organized and unleash creativity you may not even know you have! Discover the love of cooking and the joy of loving on your family in this way!

WARNING – I admit I am old school. I do not use my computer for this nor do I use the internet to find recipes (there are exceptions). Opening my computer becomes a time drain for me as I’ll see email and need to respond or lose an hour on Facebook and then realize I haven’t done what I intended to do. I am easily distracted.

So, since this all about saving time, and not wasting it, I use the basic tools of paper and pen. Take these tools and make them into what works for you.

WARNING – at first this will seem like it requires more time. Trust me on this. Investing the time to get organized now will reap huge time-saving benefits later.

Ready? This week do these seven things to get organized.

1. Determine what day of the week you will be able to consistently grocery shop. If you don’t have a regular day that you shop now, meal planning will help you form this habit. I tend to plan meals Sunday to Sunday and shop on Saturdays.

2. Make sure you have a current family calendar. I use a paper calendar, but whatever your method is, make sure you have all of your family’s activities recorded on it, including when people need to be where. You’ll need this handy.

3. Set aside 1 – 2 hours on your shopping day – or day before – to create your meal plan and shopping list. Why so long? As you get better at this, it will take less time. But at first, build this time in to your schedule so you can do a thorough inventory of what you already have and spend time getting to know your resources.

4. Identify staples for your family. You need to always check these as you make your list to see if you are close to running out. Staples include things like milk, eggs, butter etc. but also include things like a brownie mix. Having a brownie mix on hand eliminates the 9 p.m. run to the store when you realize you need to send something to school with your child the next day or that you signed up to bring a dessert to the staff luncheon.

5. Post a grocery list somewhere that is easily accessible and readily available. The one I use is an adding machine roll on a wood plaque that hangs on my wall. There are myriad versions of this that can be magnetically hung on your refrigerator. Why do you want this? Because you want to teach your family to put things on the list when they consume the last of them. Drain the OJ? It goes on the list. Used a staple? It goes on the list.

6. Figure out how you are going to record your meal plan. I use a composition notebook. Old school, remember? One notebook will hold about four years of meals. This gives you easy access to it (the importance of this will be covered next week) and gives you ideas to look back on.

7. Get to know what you have. Organize your recipes and cookbooks. For years I used a recipe card file. It was crammed so full I could barely get things in and out of it. I have converted it to a 3-ring binder with photo sheets. The clear sleeves let me flip quickly through and provides easy visibility of the recipes.

I also have several go-to cookbooks. Publix Aprons recipes, The Four Ingredient CookBook (how hard can something be when it only has 4 ingredients?), Pampered Chef and Southern Living. I think every kitchen also needs a good church cookbook.

Spend this week accomplishing these things. Next week we’ll tackle the nuts and bolts of planning and successfully implementing family meals.

Enjoy this family favorite – frig to table in 20 minutes!