Type A Mom's Dinner Meal Planning

I love watching people’s Sunday meal prep timelapse videos on Instagram – their finished product always looks amazing and they’re definitely ready for the week ahead!  But, whenever I tried to meal prep on Sundays I found it impossible to do… First, I wanted to spend time with my kids when they weren’t in school, second, Sundays are days where there are activities (sports, birthday parties, etc) so I’m often not home for big stretches of time, third, we like to host play dates that day, and fourth, having an empty kitchen for a few hours to do all the cooking was impossible!  So, after much trial and error, I came up with a different plan to alleviate the stress of weeknight dinners – on Sundays instead of “meal prepping” I do what I call “meal planning” for the upcoming weeknight dinners.

When making a movie, the food provided by Craft Services to feed the cast and crew is extremely important.  It keeps everyone fueled with energy on long shoot days, and the meals provide a time for the cast and crew to bond between shooting scenes.  The caterers in charge of the movie will publish what the meals will be for the entire week so everyone knows what to expect.  This also helps the caterers stay organized with their food ordering and preparation, and stay on time with setting it out for everyone. Without a proper plan the caterers would waste time, money, and food, and may not provide enough food or be on time with that food – and that would result in a hangry cast and crew which would be detrimental to making a movie!

A family’s meals are very much the same as on a movie set – they are important because they keep everyone fueled for whatever adventures they will be going on. And, much like on a movie set, without a proper meal plan in place a lot of time, money and food could be wasted which might result in hangry kids!  Different from a movie set is that without a plan, parents might feel very stressed with thinking about what to eat and preparing it in time for everyone to eat which is not great for family dynamics!

For my family, I realized that breakfast and lunch ideas are pretty easy to figure out and can be pulled together quickly.  But, it’s a different story when it comes to dinners… I wanted my family to have different dinners every night but figuring out what to eat right when I needed to start cooking (and knowing I needed to get everyone fed before the nighttime busyness and tiredness happened) became stressful!  After too many evenings scrambling to get dinner together, I realized I needed a dinner plan – something easy to follow so that I could focus on getting everyone fed before getting into finishing homework, bathing, and calming down before bedtime.  And so I drew upon my experience on movie sets, and that is how my dinner meal planning routine began.

What dinner meal planning means to me is that on Sunday (after I’ve filled out the activities on our wall calendar) I make plan for what each weeknight’s dinner will be and I write it down on the wall calendar.  It takes thought and planning to do it this way but I like that I’ve done the intense thinking about dinners just once for the week and then each day I simply follow my plan and make what I’ve written down.  I have found that this style of meal planning takes away the stress of staring into a fridge every night panicking about what we actually have time to make that people will eat!  Plus, a wonderful bonus to this planning is it also helps not waste what food we have, we can track when things expire and we can eat them before then, and we won’t waste time and money buying extra food when we already have plenty available at home.

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Steps to Type A Mom’s “Meal Planning”:

1. Take stock of what is in the fridge, freezer, and pantry to see what can be put together for dinners and make a list of what is there

The inside of my fridge, freezer, and pantry one Sunday 

2. Look at each weekday’s schedule so to note how busy you are each day and start to think about what you actually have time to cook each night (be realistic!)
3. Look to see which days your kids have hot lunch at school so you can choose something different than that for dinner (not only for taste but also for nutritional variety)
4. Begin to write down what you’ll have each night for dinner, taking into account those things
5. When you see that there are more dinner needs than what is in your fridge, choose a recipe based on the above criteria and then make a grocery list of items you need to get before that night’s dinner

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Here’s an example of how this could work:

1. In the fridge you see:
   1. chicken thighs
   2. some sides to make tacos like tomatoes, avocado, cheese, tortillas

2. In the freezer you see:
   1. frozen turkey pasta bake that you previously made
   2. frozen prepackaged chicken dumplings
   3. frozen peas and frozen mixed vegetables

3. In the pantry you see:
   1. a can of black beans
   2. a bag of rice

4. Now, you look at your calendar and could plan the week’s dinners like this:
   1. Monday: when you look at your calendar you see it is a busy day afterschool so you choose to take the turkey pasta bake out of the freezer right then (since it’s Sunday and it’s on your mind) and put it in the fridge so that the next night you just have to warm up it up by baking it in the oven 
   2. Tuesday: you see that it is pizza day at school and you don’t have any afterschool activities so you write down taco night since you have some of the items for that, and you start a grocery list and note that you need to buy ground beef before Tuesday 
   3. Wednesday: this is a very busy day and you won’t be home to even heat an oven before 5:30pm so that is a good night for frozen chicken dumplings and frozen mixed veggies because all of that can be boiled on the stove
   4. Thursday: you see that you have more time at home after pickup so you’ll marinate the chicken thighs (maybe Thursday morning before school) and bake it before dinnertime, and make rice and frozen peas
   5. Friday: it’s going to be a busy day (and it’s at the end of the week so you might be running out of steam to cook after the day ends) so you need something fast and either have leftovers from the other days or you make an easy slow cooker meal in the morning before you leave for the day like chicken enchiladas and note on your grocery list that you need to buy chicken breast, enchilada sauce, and corn tortillas before that day
5. When thinking of dinner ideas you can also lean on fun themes! Above you’ll see that I did Tacos on Tuesday which is a Taco Tuesday theme, and another quick theme dinner I often do is Breakfast for Dinner with simple items like eggs, bacon, fruit, waffles and pancakes which can be quick and easy to make (especially if you have toaster waffles!), and it makes for a fun twist on dinner!
6. You could continue this way of planning for the weekend as well – I usually leave the weekend evenings open to being flexible with going out to eat or ordering in, or putting leftovers together, but I do write on the calendar what we’ve decided to do so the kids can see the plan.

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This meal planning system has been so helpful to me as I look for ways to streamline the work of feeding a family dinner every night, and I hope it will help you too!