I am on Spring Break this week and it has been a very welcome reprieve in a very busy semester. I finally have time to do a few projects around the house, catch up on my reading list, watch some TV, catch up on my outlines and get some much needed extra sleep.
Another thing I have done over Spring Break is make a meal plan for the month of March. I have talked about meal planning on the blog before (See this post)- that post has a lot more info about the exact process and tips for starting out with meal prepping as a beginner. I credit meal planning with saving my sanity and my waistline regularly. Basically, meal planning means that you make a list of meals for either the week or the month and then you just get home and have dinner planned. Meal planning helps me save money when shopping because I buy ingredients I can use multiple times throughout the week and it saves us money because we go out to eat less/order in less.
For most of my marriage and even before, I relied on a weekly meal plan. I would sit down on Sunday morning and plan out my weeks worth of meals and then hit the grocery store. However, my 3L year has been SO busy that I haven't even had time for weekly grocery shopping which causes a big issue for weekly meal planning. I came across ideas for monthly meal planning on Pinterest and decided to give it a try in January to see if it helped me during this busy stage of life.
Basically, for monthly meal planning, I sit down on my living room floor at the beginning of the month with a blank calendar and all my cookbooks and recipes spread out around me. I fill in the month, repeating favorite recipes as well as adding in a few new ones to try. I build in days where I know we will have leftovers to eat or nights when we don't need to cook because of an event, etc.
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| Here is an example of my monthly meal plan. |
Weekly, this makes my life SO much easier. I can do my shopping every other week because I already know what I need to buy. I assign a meal to each day but I don't lock into that- if I have Spaghetti down for Wednesday and we aren't feeling it, I move it to Thursday and make whatever we are wanting that night instead. It is never a perfect, changeless system, but generally, it makes our lives a ton easier.
I don't know if monthly meal planning will work for me forever but for right now, when I can barely find the time to stop at the grocery store, having to only think about what to cook for dinner once a month is SO nice and has really helped us to stay on track with a healthy diet without breaking the budget through this busy time.
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