Systems To Make Meal Planning A Snap

Planning meals for your family is an ongoing, continuous process. But it can be made much simpler and more streamlined by choosing a system that works best for your lifestyle.

Meal planning systems we’ll discuss include:

• Winging It
• Category Method
• Around the World
• Weekly Favorite Rotation
• Monthly Favorite Rotation
• Protein Of The Day
• Kennedyfamfive’s Meal-Planning-When-You-Have-School-Age-Kids Method
• Kennedyfamfive’s Chef’s Choice Method

These eight methods will give you a framework for your own meal planning. Let’s get started!

Meal Planning: Winging It

We’re all in different stages of life and have different current situations, and until the last couple of years, I’d never found a meal plan that matched our family exactly.

So, my “solution” was to have a non-solution and essentially wing it every night for the past 20+ years.

{Cereal, anyone?}

And you know, while it resulted in a pretty high stress level (mostly for my husband, probably), it worked.

My kids never starved or developed scurvy.

I call that success.

So if this works for you, or if you’ve always had a regimented system, then maybe you’d actually benefit from a little winging it for a while.

The way it works is…

Just kidding, you know what to do. 😀

Meal Planning: Category Method

With this method, you assign a category to every day of the week.

For example:

Sunday	Crock Pot
Monday	Soup/Salad/Sandwich
Tuesday	Pasta
Wednesday	Casserole
Thursday	Wok
Friday	Breakfast
Saturday	Grill Out/BBQ

We attempted to use this method a few times.

Pros:

I like the flexibility of not having chili every Tuesday…instead, soup/salad/sandwich gives you a narrowed down choice of what to make but doesn’t lock you in to only one meal.

It’s also nice because I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of foods that we only eat seasonally, such as BLT pasta (summer) or chicken noodle soup (winter).

So, if I had continued with this system more than a couple of weeks at a time, I would have been able to make soups and chili in the wintertime for our Monday meal and more salads and BLT’s in the summer, when we don’t want to heat up the kitchen.

Cons:

What I didn’t like was that nowhere on this list does pizza fit in, lol.

Do you see what I mean, though? There are some recipes that simply don’t fit neatly into the categories and that just bothered me.

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If you’re thinking about going with this method, make a list of all the recipes your family enjoys and group them into categories.

Here are some general meals that I think are pretty common to help your brainstorming to get started!

Crock Pot

Pork loin

Stew meat

Pot roast

Soups	Sandwiches	Salads
Chicken noodle soup	Grilled cheese	Cobb
Taco soup	BLT’s	Fruit
Chili	Sub sandwiches	Chef
	Philly cheese steak	Southwest
	Patty melts
	Roast beef & Swiss sliders

Pasta

Chicken Alfredo

Chicken nuggets and mac & cheese

Spaghetti

Casseroles

Beef cheese (lasagna type)

Ritz Chicken

Lipton Chicken

Wok

Chicken & Broccoli

Pork & Peppers/Onions

Beef & Asparagus

Breakfast

Eggs & Grits

Waffles

Pancakes

Grill Out/BBQ

Hamburgers/Hot dogs

Steaks

Pork chops

I hope these have sparked lots of ideas for meals you can enjoy with your family!

Meal Planning: Around the World

This is a great way of meal planning if you enjoy many different types of dishes.

It simply means planning to eat a cuisine that’s typically made in a different part of the world each day of the week.

Here’s one example of what this might look like:

Personally, this meal plan sounds wonderful and super exotic…and also overwhelming!

I’m not a good enough cook for this one, and my family would probably not like enough dishes for this to work.

But if it sounds perfect for you, can we be best friends?

Meal Planning: Weekly Favorite Rotation

I think this might be the simplest method of them all.

Choose seven meals, assign them each to one day of the week, and you’re done!

You might choose the meals based on…

• The Fam: Your family’s seven favorites, like the name says
• In and Out: The seven easiest things you know how to make
• Budget: The seven cheapest things you can make

Pros:

Grocery shopping will be a breeze! Just imagine making your shopping list once, forever…and if you shop online, it’s even better.

Walmart’s Grocery App has a feature where you can take your entire cart from a previous shopping trip and just order it again!

This part alone tempts me to choose this method.

Another pro to this method is that you’re not trying to think up new things to cook all the time.

If it’s Tuesday, you know it’s taco night. You can spend your precious time thinking about other things!

Cons:

This could get boring fast.

My husband wouldn’t mind having broccoli stuffed chicken every week, but that’s it. He likes variety in our meals, and since he cooks as many of them as I do, he has a right to voice his opinion!

Meal Planning: Monthly Favorite Rotation

This is the same concept of the Weekly Favorite Rotation, except for the obvious…plan a month at a time instead of a week. 🙂

This requires you to come up with 31 meals, so it takes a good deal of planning.

But the upside is that once you have the 31 meals, then you can plug those in to your calendar each month and you’re all set.

In fact, you don’t have to come up with 31 meals if there are some meals that you know you’ll want to make two or more times in a month.

When I tried this method, here’s what I did:

• Use Excel or Google sheets for the process. Post-its could work, too, if you have a bunch of them lying around.
• List all the recipes you make. Just a running list.
• Think about some of the categories in the Category Method, listed above, to help you brainstorm.
• Go through the list and decide if there are any you’d like to have more than once and how many times that will be. Maybe you know that every Sunday night, y’all make pizza. Don’t change your tradition, just work it into the plan!
• Make a column of the numbers 1-31 with the days for the upcoming month beside them.
• List the days or dates when you know you’ll eat out or away from home and won’t be preparing the evening meal. For instance, Wednesdays if you eat at church, Saturday nights if you always go out to eat, or the 10th of the month if it’s a standing monthly date with your spouse.
• Now, start cutting and pasting your meal ideas into each one!

I hope the graphic here will give you a visual idea of what I’m talking about.

I think the Monthly Favorites plan could be especially useful if you

• like to do once-a-month cooking and freeze lots of dishes
• are at home with little ones and your days are pretty crazy–but they’re like groundhog day…each day’s routine is much like the day before
• have a life where unexpected things don’t happen much or at all

I’m pretty sure that last one is a unicorn, but if that’s you, I’d like to come over for a visit so that I can observe this new and strange phenomenon up close. 😀

Seriously, though, in theory, this plan is great.

At my house, this was impossible.

Let’s say, for example, that I decide that on the 15th we’ll have chicken fingers, a salad, and mac & cheese. Yum.

But I end up having to go to a school booster club meeting at 6 pm on the 15th, which I didn’t find out about until the 14th (true story)…and chicken fingers can’t be made ahead of time, not my recipe at least!

So, do I scrap the chicken fingers altogether, or do I move it to the next day?

Then do I move everything else in the calendar over??

And what if I’ve already bought the ingredients…do I freeze the chicken?

This kind of thing just stresses me out.

I believe in simple, so I can quickly see why this plan didn’t work out so well for us.

You might read this, though, and think: No, I’d just stick the chicken in the freezer and continue with my normal plan. No stress at all, Mary.

If that’s you, then you should definitely use the Monthly Favorite Rotation!!

The benefits for you are going to far outweigh any negatives that I can see.

Meal Planning: Protein of the Day

This is a unique one, and I like it.

Simply plan out which days of the week you’ll have chicken, beef, pork, or fish…or lamb (if you’re fancy, haha)…or meatless (if you’re cool like that).

So that each week, you’re just deciding which particular dish you want to cook on your chicken days, for example.

Pros:

I think this is great for budgeting. If you know that a beef dish is going to be more expensive than chicken and you’re trying to save money, you might just have beef once or twice a week.

Now I’ve made all the cattle farmers mad. It’s just an example! I promise we love beef at our house!

So, your rotation might look like:

	protein	this week’s menu
Sunday	beef	pot roast
Monday	chicken	broccoli stuffed chicken
Tuesday	pork	grilled pork chops
Wednesday	meatless	black bean enchiladas
Thursday	chicken	baked bbq chicken
Friday	fish	grilled salmon
Saturday	beef	hamburgers

You get the idea.

Kennedyfamfive’s Meal-Planning-When-You-Have-School-Age-Kids Method