My Top 2 Meal Planning Hacks - By Annie Crass
There are days I look into the eyes of my three beautiful children and are just totally amazed by them. Their sleepy, soft smiles that greet me in the morning. Their joyous laughter as they play contentedly together. Their sweet hearts when they say or do something completely thoughtful. I just stare at them and are captivated by the fact that I am the mom to such amazing children.
And there are times, more often than not, that I look into the faces of my three beautiful children and think, “I literally have to feed you like three times today. And that’s like actual meals. That’s not counting the snacks or other random feeding times. I just fed you yesterday. And I’m going to have to feed you tomorrow, and like every day for the foreseeable future.” And that feels like Such. A. Drag.
If you are one of those moms that lives for cooking three glorious meals for your children everyday and legitimately takes pleasure in this service, kudos to you. You are awesome and you have something in you that I don’t and I love that for you. But if you’re more like me, you can get to the point where you’re slightly dreading having to come up with some sort of cohesive meal that hits all the nutritional guidelines for your growing kids. And then you have to do it again. And again.
In seven years of mothering and meal making, I’ve picked up some hacks to make it not so dreadful. Not all the dread is gone, but for the time being, I seem to be in a good rhythm of meal making. I owe it all to two game changers: meal planning and anchors.
Yes, meal planning. You’ve read about it all over Pinterest. You’ve seen all your favorite influencers sharing their meal planning hacks. It seems to be everywhere these days. And there’s a very good reason. Put simply, it truly can take some of the hassle out of meal making. Most of the plans you read about online are for weekly meal planning. I’ve actually found that what works best for our family is monthly meal planning. Yep, you read that right. A whole month of meals planned in a short time frame. Weekly meal planning worked okay for me, until I got to the end of the week and I realized I had to come up with a whole new set of meals for the next week. And if I was lazy and didn’t plan, then the whole next week was off and I was playing catch up for a week until I sat down and planned the next week. Monthly meal planning was such a breath of fresh air to me because I can take 10 minutes out of the beginning of the month to write down our meals for that month. When one week is over, I just look at what the next week holds. When the month is over, I know I can find a 10-15 minute time frame to plan for the next month.
If you’re wondering about how I do this in practice, I bought a monthly pocket calendar off of Amazon. I cut index cards to be about the right size and wrote down our family’s meals on them. At the beginning of every month, I rearrange the numbers to reflect that month. I check my calendar to see if we have any nights I know I’m not going to need to cook. Then I go in with my meal cards and place them where I want them. Now, I can do this rather quickly thanks to my next topic, but we will get there in a moment. If something comes up and I need to edit my meal plan, I simply move the cards around to reflect the needs at that time. I have “meal” cards to show when we have dinner plans and will be eating out, cards to show when we are traveling and I don’t need to plan, and cards to show we’re eating leftovers. If you’re someone who likes to try new recipes, you could even make a card that signals to you that you’re going to try a new recipe that night. Really the beauty of this hack is you truly can make it yours and make it fit your family’s needs.
The reason I can plan out an entire month of meals in just ten minutes is because of my anchors. Anchors are what I call the type of meal that we have on a specific day. For instance, our family’s tradition is breakfast for dinner on Sundays. I love the ideas of pancakes and waffles for breakfast, but I don’t like the idea of half my dishes being dirty by 8:17 in the morning. So our family likes to make breakfast for dinner on Sundays. I know when I set out to meal plan for the month, every Sunday is getting a breakfast item card. Our family also has a Friday movie and pizza night tradition. Boom, every Friday on the calendar gets a card that says ‘pizza’. Tuesdays we have after school activities, so I know it needs to be a meal I can prep early or, better yet, be a crockpot meal. I will look through my meal cards and find something crockpot friendly and fill my Tuesdays. On Wednesdays I have extra children at my house before I take everyone to church and on top of that we eat dinner especially early on Wednesdays. Many times it’s so early my husband and I won’t eat our dinner until later that night. You can find me filling in my Wednesdays with kid friendly, quick clean up meals so we’re not late to church. After those anchors, I’m really only left with Monday, Thursday, and Saturday to come up with for meals. I typically leave my Saturdays blank to allow for some flexibility and freedom (I’ve been known to be a little spontaneous on the weekend). So now I really have two days a week to account for a normal meal, and what, that might be 8-10 days out of the month? I can find some meals to fill in those spaces.
After fulfilling all my anchor days, it’s a breeze to fill out the rest of your month. Other anchor ideas could be Taco Tuesday, Meatless Monday, Favorites Friday or some other cute alliteration that my mom brain can’t come up with at the moment. The possibilities are endless and you have the power to make it yours.
Between the two of these tools, I’ve found myself dreading making dinner a lot less. It’s a relief when I just go look at the calendar and see what’s on the menu. When everyone is home at the end of the day, it’s a beautiful time to be together. Monthly meal planning and anchors have helped me reclaim some of the joy that meal making sucked out of me. Now I actually do have the time and energy to look into those beautiful faces that I have the honor and privilege of cooking for each night.