A few months ago I decided that I would post a little info about how our family handles meal planning. I never got around to it and I’m glad I didn’t. Although the system we use is very much the same, the method and delivery have become so much simpler by using Google Calendar. We basically pick our favorite 30 meals. We plot them out throughout the month. We love these 0 meals. We could probably eat most of them once per week. Instead we limit ourselves to once per month. We hardly ever get tired of our favorite meals yet we don’t waster time saying what sounds good to you- I don’t care what sounds good to you. No more wasted air. We keep things flexible. Tuesday nights are date night and we typically pick our favorite restaurants and rotate them. On the weekends we leave some room for creativity. If we decide to try a new recipe over the weekend, we can still have some fun and spontaneity but no more last minute decisions. The other two things that make our meal planning simple is number one- we have slow cooked and prepped oven type dishes on the weekends. If we’re not feeling creative the last thing either of us wants to do on the weekend is cook. We have 3 kids under 3 and our time must be micromanaged. The second thing that keeps our meal planning simple is the coordination of ingredients. We plan our meals to use the same ingredients throughout a week. Buy some sour cream on Monday at the grocery, there is no need to despair since sour cream is featured two or three times throughout the week. Oh yeah, we only go to the grocery once per week. This is a rule in our home and we stick to it. We plan our meals, purchase our food and carry out our plan. It works well for us. We have more time to spend doing the things that really matter in life and less time doing the trivial things that don’t make much difference.

Check out our Google Meal Calendar.