Meal Prep that works!

I personally have only done a “meal prep” project once, with a friend. While that part was fun, it didn’t end very practically on the actually eating side for my family.

I like meal prep that has flexibility, predictability and a meal or two that can be put on hold.

If you are a household of 1 or 8, you should be meal planning. It saves money and time, reduces indecision and impulse buying, keeps a variety in your diet and helps you “win” dinner.

There are some steps to doing this well. I suggest beginning in a notebook or an app that you can easily flip pages on. When it’s all finished it can go into an app and I’ll share what I use and some screenshots of what it looks like.

STEP 1
Start with these three questions:
1. How many dinners am I shopping for?
2. How many people am I cooking these dinners for?
3. How much needs to be leftover for lunches?

STEP 2
The answer to the first question above is completely up to you and your life style. I currently shop for one week at a time. When we lived in the country I shopped for 2 weeks at a time, getting fresh veggies and fruit when we went to town for church.
I gave each day a “theme” to make filling a hole easier. That helps keep variety as well.
Currently, it is just Jack of All Trades and I, the only theme we have is taco Tuesday and no more than 2 meals with the same kind of meat. This week has 3 meals with tacos, we love tacos.
Choose themes or no themes, add any other “rules” and finally make a master list of the meals your family will actually eat. If you are going to give the days themes, sort the meals on the master list by theme. One of our theme days, I later learned the children hated, was slow cooker day. I have a list of categories below for how our meals are currently sorted on my master list.

Slower cooker
Casserole/other
Tacos/pasta
Sandwiches

As you can see there aren’t too many categories. This just helps us narrow things down a bit.

Action steps here:
Themes or no? If yes, what are they?
Make a master list of as many meals as you can think of that your family, or most of them, will eat. Then “sort” them into categories. If you’re on paper mark them in different colors or shapes. It will become a “living” document later.

STEP 3
Choose an app to help you keep all of this sorted and useful. I did all of this in a notebook for a while because I like old school, but an app is so much better, especially when we get to the next step on making the grocery list.
I use Google Keep for this. I have also used Notes.
Google Keep became easier for me when I saw that I could access it on the computer, easily reorder the items on the list and that it has an “undo” button. One downside is that while you can tag different notes and lists into different categories and reorder them, you can’t sort them away like files into folders. I’ve gotten used to this. It is an upside of Notes but I was getting tired of the ads.
I have 3 lists that apply to shopping and eating.
First, the dinners list. Not only is this that master list of ideas, but above all of that I have the dinners for the week, listed as they will be eaten. Then I know what is happening when, what I need to thaw or start when and if there’s a meal that gets skipped for some reason I can move it to next week.

Then, the main grocery list. This is the list for the place where I do the bulk of the grocery shopping.

Finally, I have a list that has other places, including the hardware and book store. I can easily add anything we need to these lists any time.

STEP 4
Make your lists.
I take 2 days to do this. On Wednesday night, usually during dinner, I ask for dinner ideas. As everyone is thinking I’m filling in things I know we haven’t eaten from last week’s list, those will still be there if you’re using this list to check off meals as you go, events or parties we have and counting to see how many ideas we need. When the spots are filled, done for today. I remind everyone that tomorrow I will be making the grocery list so be thinking about what you need.
On Thursday, again during dinner, I make the grocery list. Using Keep to do this has been game changing for me. I have about 50 items that are staples that are checked and unchecked all the time. I don’t have to rewrite them each time I make the list. I also like to put the list in the order that the store is set up. This is why I switched from paper to app. The amount of time this has saved. I can do a full week’s worth of shopping, if I’m alone, in less than 30 minutes, including check out, with a list put together as the store is laid out.

In the photos below you can see that I set up the cart with intention as well. This helps make bagging go quicker and ultimately putting things away go quickly too.

See my knitting bag sticking out in photo 3?