Meal Planning 101 - Part 3

If you are reading my part 3, you've probably read my part 1 HERE and part 2 HERE.

Part 3 is keeping track of your recipes that you've planned out for the next 7 days.  It does no good if you decided on 7 dinners and now can't remember what you planned on eating and shopped for.

I like to use my trusty calendar:

I just write in that day's dinner (I only plan out dinner but if you like all 3 meals, do that too!) at the bottom of that day...

It's totally retro, I know, to still be using a non-digital wall-calendar, but I'm still getting into the whole digital thing.  Old habits die hard I suppose.  BUT, if how you keep your life together is with a digital calendar, that's what you would use!  The reason I keep all my meal planning on my calendar that keeps my life together is because what I have going on that day ALWAYS affects what I will be eating that evening!  If you have a million of errands to run all afternoon, you probably won't be finding time to cook something that takes an hour or more of prep.  But you'd never know that unless you kept the meal planning and your daily schedules on the same calendar.

So I can see on my calendar that we have soccer practice at 5:30 on Thursdays - this is right in the middle of my dinner prep time (we usually eat dinner about 6 at our house).  With that in mind, I can then plan my meal - it needs to be something we can either eat before we leave or can be ready right when we get home.  Crock-pot meals work great for us on nights like this, or something in the sandwich category.  Just no/low prep time involved.

Another great use for calendaring is when I go to the calendar to see what's up for that day's activities, I can see that I have Chicken Pot Pie planned for dinner that evening.  I'll know that I need to go thaw/cook my frozen chicken either the night before or that morning.

So, I'm assuming, if you are running a family household full of schedules, you have a calendar you use to keep track of everyone and everything.  Try adding your meal planning to that calendar so you can plan, cook and eat food that will be condusive to your family's activities for that day.