Feeding your hungry Humans

Meal planning has been a huge help to me the last couple of years, but I’m a very mood-based eater (and cook!) so choosing what to cook each week can easily become an agonizing process that can take me up to FOUR HOURS. Yes, really. At that point, I’m not really saving myself any time, I’m just lumping all the decision-making together. So, as I try to abdicate my role as the Queen of Over-complicating Things, I am going to have another go at simplifying my meal planning process.

The positive side of being incredibly inefficient for a long time is that I have figured out some of the things that definitely do NOT work for me. Things that might seem perfectly normal to other people, like assigning a meal to a particular day (like Taco Tuesdays, for example), or only buying one day’s worth of ingredients at a time. I’m kind of reverse-fussy: I get bored easily, don’t like to cook or eat the same things too frequently, and am governed by fickle food-moods. Add to that one normal-fussy child (WHY ARE THE DIFFERENT FOODS TOUCHING?), one flavour hunter, two food-flinging toddlers, and a FIFO husband who needs to be factored in some weeks but not others, and you can see why I’m so desperate to simplify things for myself!

I have a pretty long list of requirements for meals, which is why they MUST be planned out, or they just don’t happen. I also don’t like going grocery shopping multiple times per week with twin toddlers in tow! So I try to think of food for dinner along these lines:

• It tastes good.
• It meets our nutritional needs.
• My kids will eat it.
• It is cooked in a few short steps
• It is made with minimal pots and pans.
• It’s onion-free and low dairy so I can eat it too (this usually means cooking from scratch).
• It reheats well.
• It suits our budget.

I don’t think I’ve ever found a meal that meets ALL those requirements, but that’s my holy grail of meal planning. One day I WILL find that magical unicorn meal choice!

Anyway, I’m trying a few things to reduce my mental workload, and I’m inviting you along for the ride. Since I so clearly do NOT have this all figured out, I would love your tips and feedback on what helps you cook and eat successfully. Here’s what I’ll be trying:

Step One: Make it pretty

Sound ridiculous? Well, it kinda is. But a key part of sticking with anything is that it has to have an element of enjoyment. So make it pretty!
It also has to make sense to your brain. That’s why I’ve designed this meal guide. I found a lot of meal planners that only factored in breakfast, lunch and dinner, or sometimes just dinner! (Don’t these people eat during the day???) So if your brain works like mine and needs to see chunks of time in chronological order, go ahead and download our meal guide!

Step Two: Make it printable

Last year I spent a lot of time trying out different meal planning apps, calendar apps and organiser apps. I wanted it to be portable and accessible wherever I was. However, I quickly realised that anything on a screen that can be deleted without a trace leaves my brain wondering if I imagined it all in the first place. While printing may not be the most environmentally friendly method, scribbling out a plan is better for your brain. (You can read a cool article about that here).

Step Three: Make it manageable

Here’s where I try and perfectionist-proof this activity (ha!). The most important thing you need to know is that this meal guide is NOT designed to be filled out completely. That would be insane! Each block simply shows a chunk of time. If you want to plan food during that slot, go ahead and write it in. If not, that block will show a period of time during which you may or may not choose to eat or make food. I will be leaving plenty of blanks on my sheet, and feeding my kids snacks and meals made from fridge and pantry staples that I don’t need to microplan.

Step Four: Stay flexible

Remember how I mentioned crossing things out before? I do that a lot, and although it will mess with the prettiness of my meal guide, it’s a crucial part of my meal planning style. You might have noticed that I haven’t called it a meal planner – it’s a guide only, so you don’t feel like you’ve failed at following your plan when life happens and you have to recalibrate. I start by choosing 4-6 dinners and write those into the boxes, and then shuffle them around based on what’s going on as we reach each day. Playdate ran late? I’ll switch to a quicker meal that I had planned for Thursday. More leftovers than I expected? We’ll have that as tonight’s meal and put the planned ingredients in the freezer for a later night.

Step Five: Have a back-up plan

I’m pretty sure the number of things that can go wrong increases exponentially with each child that you have. With four kids, even my back-up plans need their own back-up plans. Some of my favourite back-up hacks are:

• Pantry meals that take less than ten minutes to cook (think Baked Beans on toast, 2-minute noodles) for nights when it all falls apart.
• Meals that use only freezer and pantry ingredients, for when you forget to buy the fresh parts (Quiche, Pizza wraps, Nachos)
• A master list of all the meals I can cook, for when my brain doesn’t work (which is pretty much all the time).
• Four pre-made combinations of a week’s worth of meals, so I can default to those if I don’t have any more interesting ideas.

Here’s the planner (guide! I mean guide!) at the end of its first week:

As you can see, it didn’t stay pretty for long! The daytime meals and snacks are just jotted down as ideas, the bottom row had to be re-ordered based on life, and I never remembered to defrost the pie so it’s still in the freezer for this week! But having a rough guide written down meant that I was not standing in front of an open fridge with my brain melting out of my ears at 4pm trying to concoct a meal while my kids ran riot. Instead, I was able to shut the fridge and cook dinner (while my kids ran riot anyway) which nudged us one step closer to bedtime. Hurrah!

Let me know if you try out our free download, or if you have any tips to send my way. I would love to hear from you!

xxx Mon

P.s. If you like things to be matchy matchy, we’ve also created a shopping list to go with the meal guide. You can download that here and print both from one document. Enjoy!