I love batching. I will try to batch just about anything I can. I will do it compulsively as part of my OCD. My latest attempt at batching is the monthly meal plan and grocery shopping excursion. Let me start by listing the problems I see with not planning a menu, not making a grocery list, and not shopping efficiently.

1. If you don’t plan what you’ll eat (leaving some run for flexibility and creativity) then you will have many arguments that go like this. What do want? What sounds good to you? I don’t know, what sounds good to you? Do you just want to pick something up? I’m not going out. “Screaming hungry kids in background cause more stress.” Let’s just cook some chicken here. What there isn’t any thawed out? Well I’ll just whip something up real quick. OK what? That doesn’t sound good to me. Pause Pause- 15 minutes has gone by. OK what do you want? I’ll run out at get fast food so we can put off those weight loss goals, give the kids some quick junk, have heart burn in 2 hours and spend money we should save.  That is how the conversation went in the Raley Household. Did I hit a nerve?
2. OK now we’re at the grocery, which in our case is Costco and Kroger. Hey how many cans of tomatoes do we use to make the chili? Do we have half the pot roast left in the freezer? Are we out of taco shells? I think I used the last of the ketchup, should we get some more? Without a list of ingredients for the meals you’ve planned, and a inventory of your pantry, fridge and freezer you would likely have multiple conversations like this while you’re at the store.
3. Now that we’re back from the initial trip, here’s how the saga unfolds. I told you we were out of canned tomatoes. I thought we had some. My bad. Now I can’t make chili, spaghetti sauce or lasagna. Oh yeah and I can’t make the beef vegetable soup. We should have bought an extra pack of chicken too. I’ll run out tomorrow, and pack up our three small children to go and do this all over again. Two days later. Since I didn’t think it through again and make a list the second time- I forgot to have you pick up the oregano and parsley for the sauces. No big deal I’ll stop on the way home from work and pick it up. I have an enormous amount of free time and I’m independently wealthy. Whether you are lugging three kids or just yourself, making multiple stops for anything is a huge waste of time. I used to joke with my wife when she made her weekly pack up the kids and go spend $50-$75 at Kroger trip. I would ask her how long it would take and she would almost always underestimate the time by 30-45 minutes. This is true for me as well and probably for you. We are very good at misleading ourselves into believing that things take much less times than they actually do.
4. Every time you do any of the above you are task switching and creating open loops of new tasks to do. Not to mention spending money in two transactions is much easier to record than having 8 receipts from 6 different stores on 6 different days. Tough to budget that way.

Just a small caveat based on my personal preference. If it were just me, which it’s not- as I have a wife and 3 small children; then I would eat very simply. I would eat the same things over and over for breakfast and or lunch and mix in some variety with dinners. I did this twice in my life and it helped me lose over 30 lbs both times. For me it is a chore and major pain to take time to think of what I want to eat. After all it’s just fuel for my body. Since it’s not just me, and I have little mouths to feed, we add more complexity to our meal plan, but at the same time I think you’ll see the simplicity in the concept.

Here is how we do it.

• First we live an uncluttered life and this can be seen in our kitchen. The set up is very minimalistic and the pantry, cabinets, fridge and freezer (in the garage) all are very organized. It is simple to look in and see what we have in inventory and what we need.
• Second we like to eat the same handful of meals. In our case we’ve picked out 24 meals. We take out a simple monthly paper calendar, you could create a separate Google calendar, I ‘ve done it that way in the past. We add the same four meals to Mondays from the previous month. Tuesday night is date night and we eat out somewhere fairly cheap with a coupon or gift card. Wednesday four more meals. Thursday four more. Friday you guessed it four more meals. That is 16 meals plus the four eating out meals. That leaves us four on Saturday and four on Sunday. These are typically caseroles, comfort foods, soups and chili while the meals during the week are quite healthy.
• Each meal has it’s own side dishes that don’t change.  If we’re having Roast Beef, then it’s grilled cabbage and parmigiana potatoes. This makes it easy to scan the meal list, look at the ingredients, compare it to our pantry and alter our list. We don’t recreate the list each time. Of course we batched it. We made a template with all the ingredients and which of the two stores they typically come from- Costco or Kroger.
• We line up my mom as our babysitter on Tuesday nights for our date night. Most Tuesdays we relax, have a meal or make our quick pick ups (I’ll explain in a moment). Every 4th Tuesday night, we pick a restaurant where we can eat quickly. Mexican and sandwich shops work great for this. We’re in and out in less than 30 minutes. We leave at 5:45PM or so and finish eating by 6:30PM. We head to Costco, divide and conquer our list. By the way we also pick up all the toiletries, baby stuff and cosmetics at Costco using the same list process. We leave Costco and head to Kroger. We divide and conquer the list at Kroger and are back home by 9PM.
• When we get home I breakdown all food out of its packaging when possible for easier storage, while Ashley puts the kids to bed. We have successfully planned out, shopped for and stored all the food we will need for the month in three hours of shopping and about two hours of prep beforehand.

Now the world is not perfect so occasionally we forget something or use more of an ingredient that we thought. The dog runs out of food or the fruit molded in the fridge. In this case we make any quick stops as part of our date night routine. After a nice dinner and cup of coffee, we may bounce around a store or run into a Walgreens to pick up a knick-knack. We are pretty detailed about this process so this rarely happens to us, but it does give you a flexible way to keep the system in tact. The key is that it’s fun time and intentional. There is no stress because it was unplanned, untimely or the result of our own shortsightedness.

Here are a couple other keys to pulling this off.

Document your favorite meals. Some people eat their favorite meal once per week. We strive for once a month, and it’s cool because we never tire of the meals and we’re always looking forward to them. After all it’s been a month since digging into Ashley’s Chicken Kabobs with Cous Cous or her Chicken Enchiladas.

Empty out your car or van before you go. You will fill it up.

Keep the menu interesting but simple.

Plan your meals with the freshest ingredients earlier in the month.

Used your frozen or canned vegetables and fruits for later in the month.

We freeze 3 loaves of bread and the 6 gallons of milk we buy fits into our fridge and a small dorm fridge in our basement. You can do the same. The milk is organic and the expiration is much closer to a month instead of a week.

Separate your meats before you freeze them so they are easy to grab and thaw the day you need them.

Take everything out of it’s package when possible to create easier storage. I will post some pictures which show our pantry, fridge, freezer and dorm fridge. They are not overly cluttered even on the day we do our shopping.

Give this a try and use the time you save to do the following:

• Spend time with your family
• Read or write or blog
• Practice a hobby
• Volunteer
• Connect with a ministry, missionary, or nonprofit you want to support
• Watch an inspirational movie
• Relax and do nothing
• The possibilities are endless