Meal plan for the week

“I’m not a good meal planner. I really enjoy food and cooking so anytime I would plan out a week of meals there would inevitably come a day that I just didn’t feel like eating was on the menu. [...] Only plan 3 days of meals. I realize that those 6 words may fall completely flat for you, but the instant I realized that I didn’t have to do the entire week I felt like I could handle the process. So I started doing that and it worked! I would plan out Sunday-Wednesday meals, and one of them had to be leftovers. Usually I would try to make Monday’s dinner something that we could eat again on Tuesday because we host a bible study on Tuesday night and it’s better not to destroy the kitchen with cooking that day. Then by about Tuesday, or sometimes Wednesday morning, I would plan the rest of the week’s meals. At that point I would either order the groceries online from our local grocery store, or just fit in a quick trip with the boys. It was always a smaller load because I had already gotten the larger weekly groceries on Sunday of that week. Condensing the task down to 2 ‘bite sized’ tasks led me to having so much more success with meal planning, and therefore lowered my stress level dramatically!”

“On the meal plan I created last Friday, I put today as leftovers because by the end of the week we have so many leftovers from previous meals and these need to be eaten or they will go bad. So today I finish the last of my chipotle egg salad in a wrap for breakfast. [...] We head home and I start making dinner for all four of us. I make parmesan spaghetti squash with turkey Italian sausage.”