With 2 meals a day, 7 days a week, 4 weeks a month, that equals 56 meals. In a year, that freakishly scary amount of meals would be the cause of me being in a loony bin. At least I’d be served meals there. Ok, maybe there’re the occasional leftovers and the 1% eating out. I still need brain power to figure out which leftovers to eat and where to dine, right? What about breakfast, you ask? Well, those are the “eat whatever we have meal time”. Toasts. Pancakes. French toast. Cereal. More toasts. Pancakes. Toasts. Get the gist?
Cooking isn’t that bad. I mean, I think I like to cook. All that thing about it being therapy and all that, well.. it is crap if you have to make 56 X 12 meals. On the other hand, thinking about what to cook, well, that would be like dropping high-pressure compressed farts into my head and letting them explode. Repeatedly.
Meals have to be healthy, tasty, and have variety (rhyming intended). If I can eat fried chicken every meal, who cares if I have to think about making fried chicken 56 X 12 times a year. But who eats fried chicken 56 X 12 times a year? Back to square one.
So to keep me off the loony bin and the insides of my head splattering all across the room, I had to do what I thought I’d never do in my life. A weekly meal plan. Heck, sometimes bi-weekly ones. That’s right. I never used to plan anything in my life. I hated planning. In fact the only thing in life I’ve always planned is not to get myself into a situation where I have to plan…. But here I am, planning. The irony.
Oh, I used to laugh at people making meal plans. Nerdy. Boring. Just cook whatever you feel like is what I used to think. Fried chicken is what I always feel like cooking. Now they laugh at me.
If you’re like me, meal planning doesn’t save on gas or time spent at grocery stores because I never stick to my list. Neither does it save money by shopping efficiently because… I never stick to my list. And just like not sticking to my shopping list, I don’t stick to my meal plans either. But it’s there. It’s a guide when I need them. It keeps my head insides intact. It keeps me sane. And that’s more than enough of a reason to do this.
Above is a my meal planning process. Isn’t it beautiful?
Let’s have a tour shall we?
The utmost right is my waterfall list. Why? Because it never ends. When planning meals for the week, I’ll steal some dishes from the waterfall list and pluck it into the weekly list (left). I continually update the waterfall list with what I deem new and unexplored. If I want to learn how to make a dish Mr. V or I love but never made it before, it goes into the waterfall list as well. Basically all ideas, old and new goes in there. So in theory, I’ll never run out of ideas.
Looking at the weekly lists (left), there are two rows of dishes for each day, one for lunch and the other for dinner. You’ll also see red colored text. Those are highlighted to keep them at a minimal. The dreaded leftovers. Some meals have leftovers while others don’t. Most leftovers are eaten within a few days time while some (especially big batches or those that freeze well) will be placed in the freezer for future consumption.
With meal plans, I get a ‘bird’s eye view of what I’m going to be eating or what I’ve eaten. That way, dishes are pretty rarely repeated which results in a variety of food in my diet. This expands my food experience due to the difference cuisine I’d like to explore. And unless I plan 14 different fried chicken for the week, meals can become healthier too as I try to balance the different types of meat, grains or vegetables eaten.
The end.
How do you keep yourself sane, in the meal planning department that is?
