Meal planning doesn’t scare me as much as it seems to scare other people. In August, before school started, I sat down and planned out four months of menus. I wouldn’t normally be that on top of things, but because I was nervous about my first semester as a full time working mom, I figured I should probably have some kind of plan in place. I’m a big fan of variety. As easy as it would be to have every Tuesday be tacos, every Friday be pizza, and every Monday be spaghetti, I wouldn’t stick to a meal plan like that because I would get restless and bored. I decided that what I could do was to create a similar framework, but with categories assigned to each day of the week, instead of a single meal. The categories can change from month to month, or they can stay the same.
So, for example, in August Monday is pasta night, in September it’s Mexican food, in October it’s chicken, and in November it’s pork. Wednesday night is soup and sandwich, or soup and salad, all three months, because we really like soup, and there is a wide variety of soup recipes we can make.
The benefit of this framework is that when you sit down to pick out recipes, you don’t ask yourself overwhelming questions like. “What 31 things in all of creation do I feel like making for dinner this month?” You ask yourself manageable questions like, “What four hot dishes (casseroles) sound good in December.”
I’ve compiled a list of categories that I’ve used before, in case anyone finds it helpful to use.
- Soup and sandwich
- Soup, salad and breadsticks (like Olive Garden)
- Hot dish (for those outside of our area, a hot dish is a casserole)
- Sliders (these are easy and there are a lot of variants)
- Burgers
- Meatballs
- Pasta
- Mexican
- Roasts
- Chicken
- Pork
- Beef
- Meatless
- Brinner
- Stew
- Pot pie
- Eggs
- Salads
- German
- Cold/Hot sandwiches
I do usually repeat the same thing every Friday for a month, but rotate what that is between waffles and make-your-own pizza. I have one of my big boys, James for waffles, and Travis for pizza, that is in charge of being the meal helper on Fridays, so they alternate months. They enjoy it a lot. We also have a standing date with my dad one Friday a month for fish fry at a local supper club, in the longstanding Wisconsin tradition. Most Saturdays we either have a hot dog cookout by the bonfire, with s’mores, or, if the weather is bad, sliders and some kind of chips or crackers and dip for a game night indoors. It’s not a perfect system, but it works pretty well for us.
