“The absence of a plan is a plan to fail.” -Ben Franklin
How was your day? If it is anything like mine, it is normal for unexpected things to happen that throw off the day’s plan and schedule. When it comes to food, I think we’ve all been there in similar ways: work finishes late, there was traffic, you had to help someone who had a meltdown, you had a meltdown, the list goes on. Oh now what time is it? 7PM, 8PM, 9PM, 10PM… still no dinner plans. Who wants to make decisions then? Not me. Let’s order takeout (again).
The pandemic has increased everyone’s stress, and therefore increases the likelihood that your initial plans for the day get derailed. Unless one person is clearly in charge of food prep all the time, you either have to have a daily conversation about dinner plans, or you’re going to arrive at that same tough conversation our family has had when making decisions at a late hour. It’s like a game of hot potato. Until we decided that this was not working for us.
Now, I am personally resistant to a lot of structure in my life. I like to imagine my Puerto Rican ancestors living simple lives on the farm, picking mangoes off the tree and enjoying them in a shady beach spot with no clocks or calendars. Pura vida or whatever. I feel like every year of my adult life has been a slow walk towards having a more thoroughly filled and color-coded calendar life, and though at times I dislike it a lot, I cannot deny that it often works and, somewhat paradoxically, reduces overall stress (when applied smartly).
So, I want to share with you our super system for weekly planning! I’m no meal prep wizard, but I do appreciate a system that works.
Here is what we do:
- Weekly Household Meeting: *Groan* right? Not necessarily! We keep it strictly to this type of planning so that it takes <15 minutes total. We go over our appointment/fixed work schedule, creative work schedule (e.g. writing), workout times, doggy daycare drop off and pickup schedule, chores, grocery trips, events/outings, I think that’s it. If you are in a relationship, you can think of it as the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing. Communication!
Use whatever system is comfortable for you. For us, we use a combination of: Google Calendar & Spreadsheet, Whiteboard in the kitchen (for high visibility reminders), and Whiteboard Calendar for high visibility meal planning (more below).
We made the mistake early on of including business and finances with this meeting, but discovered it’s too easy for those projects to take over. So, separate meetings for Biz and finance if that applies to you. - Big Calendar: We found a big whiteboard/erasable kind on Amazon. Paper ones work too, but we like the idea of reusing the same one indefinitely. This is where we get down to business and write out our dinner plans for each day of the week
- Start with the protein for the day (e.g. Salmon, chicken, steak, burgers, Tofu, etc.).
- Then add a green vegetable to go with it, such as broccoli, kale, salad, chard, etc.
- Include a carb source if you like, such as rice, sweet, potatoes, fruit, etc. We find that carbs are so easy to come by that we don’t usually need to plan this, but you might, especially if you’re cooking for 4+ people.
- Then, take stock of what you already have in your fridge/freezer/pantry, and underline in a different color (e.g. red) the items you need to get from the grocery store.
- Then, circle or highlight similarly in another color the items that require some additional preparation, such as defrosting, marinating, etc.
- From the red underlined items, you make your grocery list. We use a color-coded google spreadsheet for this, but again go with whatever is comfortable for you.
Boom! Done. This may seem complex at first, but once you start it’s like, “duh, of course this makes my life easier.” Below is a picture of our calendar for this month.
We don’t always follow it 100%, but it helps immensely. Usually tacos are on Saturdays :).
Talk with your significant other, start small, and improve as you go!
Coach Mauricio