I don't know about you, but making dinner happen for my family can be a challenge. Both Jeff and I have our own careers, my daughter has school activities, Girl Scouts and gymnastics and my 2 year old son's hunger does not like to wait for anything! I've tried so many different tactics myself and I've spoken to hundreds of my clients about their own struggles with this issue and I've found the easiest and most successful process in making dinner happen:
1. Make a realistic goal for how many home meals vs. eating out you will have in a given week. If you are eating out 4-5 times per week right now, making a goal of not eating out at all would be unrealistic for you. Start with decreasing your eating out and then move it down over time. In general, I believe the ultimate goal of keeping the eating out down to 2 days per week is a good goal to shoot for.
2. Plan your meals for an entire seven (7) day period. Make a spreadsheet or worksheet that makes it easy to write each day of the week and beside that day, put the meal you have chosen. For example, our family chooses to eat out every Friday evening, so I write that in next to my Friday spot. Plan out lunches the same way. Use your recipe books, online resources and family favorite meal ideas to fill in your sheet. Make sure you take into consideration leftovers! Either plan to redo leftovers to make something else or stretch one meal over 2 dinner nights. Or plan to eat leftovers for some of the parent and/or child lunches. This saves time and money.
3. Now make your grocery list and go shopping for those items. Take the worksheet from above and list out all the food items you need at the grocery store. Include healthy snacks and basic everyday food and beverages along with sundry and cleaning items. Note that you will be shopping for an entire 7 day period. This allows you to go on auto pilot for the week! Pick the same day each week to plan the week out and go grocery shopping. For many people it is a weekend day, but for others that have time during the week it could be a day when less people are out grocery shopping. That is the best scenario.
My very favorite meal planning resource is The Six O'Clock Scramble. It is a monthly subscription that you can pay for which will provide you with 5 fast, healthy and great-tasting meals in your email box one a week. What's so awesome about this subscription is that each week comes with its own grocery list of all the items needed for the meals! And if you don't like one or more of the recipes, no problem. Go onto the Scramble website and pick/choose your own meals. Once you are done, it calculates your grocery list! Aviva Goldfarb, the author of both the subscription and the cookbook The Six O'Clock Scramble is a genius. She's got another book coming out in April, place your order now on Amazon.com for delivery upon release.
Happy Eating!!
I have found that each family needs to find their little niche of what will work. I need to do things by the month, we live in a semi rural area. But starting with 7 days is great. A master menu has been the biggest help to me this month. We have cut our going out to eat from 3 times a week to 4 times this month. We have kept snacks to eat if we get caught in town (25 min. from home) and don't want to go out to eat. We are planning going out to eat on purpose instead of survial mode. I have used the 6 O'Clock Scramble myself and enjoyed it. I use it now as a resource.
ReplyDeletePlanning and baby steps do work!
R.Warrington
Rachel,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your awesome comments. I completely agree that it ultimately comes down to what works for your specific family. Fabulous ideas including the master menu!!