My husband and I got married over three years ago now and it has taken me this long to feel like I know what I am doing in the kitchen. He grew up in a family of nine and his mother is a wonderful cook, so I had a lot to live up to. I tried new recipes from time to time in the beginning of our marriage, but I never really felt like I knew what I was doing. I hated that dreaded question of What’s for dinner?

We ended up using HelloFresh for a while, which I believe really helped me out with learning how to cook. They would send me all of the ingredients, pre-measured, and I would follow their very simple steps to make a lovely dinner. However, it is definitely not the most budget-friendly and once we bought a house, we decided to stop and use what we learned to figure out something else to save some money.

When I was pregnant recently with my second child, I really started to figure out and get into the groove of this whole cooking and meal planning thing. I knew I had to figure it out before I was trying to figure out having two kids under two. I also knew whatever I was going to cook had to be simple. We tried a lot of dump-and-go Crockpot meals and recipes labeled “easy” and “simple.” Most of the recipes we tried have become our weekly or biweekly staples because we ended up loving them so much!

I have seen a lot of meal planning out there where they sit down one day a week and write down exactly what they are going to have for dinner Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. Then they go shopping for the ingredients for those meals for the week. While I do incorporate a little bit of that in our meal plan, ours works a little bit differently. 

Let’s get into it!

• Make a list of meals you and your family likes

When we were trying out a lot of new recipes, we started to make a list of what meals we liked. The recipes we didn’t like, didn’t make it on the list. We now have over 10 recipes I would call our staples. I am going to start adding these to my website so you can try them out for yourself, but these are our some of our staples:

• Crockpot Salsa Verde Chicken Tacos
• Chicken & Potatoes in the Crockpot
• Beef & Potatoes in the Crockpot
• Crockpot Sweet Potato Chili
• Crockpot White Chicken Chili
• Cheese Enchiladas
• Shepherd’s Pie
• Tater Tot Casserole
• Sausage & Rice Casserole
• Grilled Chicken with a veggie & mashed potatoes or rice
• Beef Tacos with Mexican Rice

For the most part these are the meals I am cooking, but this list evolves overtime. There are some meals that used to be on the list that we got sick of and took them off the list. We also try new recipes from time to time and sometimes those recipes end up on the list.

• Try to Pick Meals with Easy-to-Store Ingredients

Now, for a lot of the meals on my list, a lot of the ingredients are easy to store, even long term. For example, almost all of the meals include canned goods and pantry items, which have a long shelf life. The recipes also include a lot of frozen vegetables, which have a much longer shelf life than fresh produce. The only fresh produce I really buy for my dinners are potatoes and onions, which both last very long.

If there is a meal on your list with an ingredient that does not last long, just cook that meal on grocery shopping day or the day after. For Beef Taco nights, I love to add shredded lettuce on my tacos, which is an ingredient that doesn’t last long. So, we usually eat tacos on the day that I go grocery shopping.

For the meat, I always buy *frozen chicken breasts* and frozen beef chubs in bulk from Costco because those are the two meats we go through the most. For any other meats I buy, it goes straight into the freezer when it gets home, as well. Around lunchtime is when I decide what I am going to cook for dinner and I either fire up the Crockpot or pull the frozen meat out of the freezer to defrost in time to make dinner.

*Side note, I have a hack for the frozen chicken breasts I buy from Costco! I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but you know that giant bag of frozen chicken breasts? It is such a good deal, but in the past I stopped buying it because it would annoy me so much when all of the pieces would stick together and I could not just grab two without like six being stuck together. Well, now when I get home from buying it, I separate it into gallon size Ziplock bags with about 2-3 breasts in each bag. So, when I am cooking chicken, I just need to pull out one of the Ziplocks. It makes it so much easier!*

• Always Have the Ingredients in Your Kitchen

Since the recipes on my list have ingredients with a long shelf-life, we always have the ingredients for any meal on our list. Once we cook a meal, the ingredients for that meal get put on next week’s shopping list so they are ready to go for the next time we make it. I love doing this because I never have to wonder if I have everything to make something, I just know I do!

For our meal plan, we don’t necessarily know what we are eating every single night for dinner and instead I figure it out the day of or sometimes the day before depending on what sounds good for the night. I have a few days every week where I do know exactly what we are having, which I will get into in the next point, but I haven’t really felt the need to do it every week for our meal plan to work for us.

• A few special days a week that we have the same thing

There are a few days of the week that we always have the same thing. Some of these are breakfast things and some are dinners.

• Muffin Monday
• Taco Tuesday
• Waffle Wednesday
• Fiesta Friday (Cheese Enchiladas)

*I have been slowly adding to the list as I come up with other cute names. I really want to try to have something for everyday. Please let me know if you have any ideas for the days I’m missing! I’m open to breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even snack ideas!*

For dinners, Tuesday is always tacos and Friday is always enchiladas. I do enchiladas Friday because it is the only meal I cook with no meat and we don’t eat meat on Fridays. Since I like fresh shredded lettuce on my tacos, Tuesday is also the day I grocery shop!

I like having a few days a week where we eat the same thing no matter what and for the rest of the days, it is really up to what sounds good for that night or something we haven’t had in a little while. 

• Eat ALL of the leftovers

I don’t know about you, but up until I started cooking for myself and paying for my own groceries, I hated leftovers. Just the thought of it grossed me out for some reason. I would always groan if it was leftovers night in my house growing up and would usually end up having a bowl of cereal or something else instead.

My oh my have the tables turned now because leftovers night has become my new favorite night of the week for many reasons! One, I don’t have to cook. Two, there are way less dishes. And three, it basically feels like a free meal since I am not using new ingredients from my pantry to cook it. 

In our household, we have two adults, a toddler, and a baby and most of the meals I cook serve 6-8 people. So, we always have food leftover. Some of the time it is even enough to feed everyone again. If that is the case, we eat it right away the next night. However, sometimes there is not enough food for everyone and so I cook again the next night. The night after that is when we usually eat leftovers from the past two nights, just to make sure everyone gets enough to eat. Leftovers sometimes get eaten for lunch, too!

• Have a few easy freezer meals for backup

Now for most nights for dinner I need to figure out what I am doing around lunchtime for meat to defrost or for the meal to get enough time in the Crockpot, but as you know, life happens. Sometimes we may be out of the house longer than normal or the day is chaotic and next thing I know it is already 6:00 and I haven’t thought about dinner one time.

For days like these, we could always have leftovers if they are available, but what if there are not any leftovers either? Then, you must have something quick and easy to throw in the oven straight from the freezer and maybe make a few easy sides, too!

Right now, the backup meals that are always in our freezer are:

• Frozen pizzas
• Frozen orange chicken, which I make with rice and canned green beans
• Frozen taquitos

We really only reach for these a few times a month, but it is reassuring to know that I have at least something that will get food on the table quickly! We also don’t make pasta very often, but we always have noodles and pasta sauce in our pantry for emergency dinners, too.

• Easy breakfasts and lunches and snacks

At this point I have only really discussed dinners because that is the biggest meal of the day for our house, but I’d like to mention what I do for breakfasts, lunches, and snacks.

As I mentioned earlier, we have Muffin Mondays and Waffle Wednesdays, which are days we always make muffins and waffles for breakfast. The muffins always last at least two days, so Tuesdays we usually have leftover muffins, too. On Muffin days we also tend to have yogurt or some fresh fruit to go with it.

For the other breakfast days, we have a few options that are always available in our pantry, fridge, or freezer. They are mostly easy things I can throw together quickly, because if you know me, you know I am not a morning person in the slightest. We have:

• Eggs
• Oatmeal
• Pancake Mix
• Eggo French Toast Sticks (because my son likes them)

For lunch, leftovers are an option if they are available, but we also have other quick and easy things I can throw together. Such as:

• Quesadillas
• Grilled cheese
• Peanut butter and jelly sandwich
• Turkey & cheese sandwich
• Smoothie/protein shake
• Frozen taquitos

For snacks, these sort of tend to evolve based on what sounds good, but we have a few staples that we always have in our kitchen:

• Cheese
• Yogurt
• Apple sauce
• Goldfish
• Fruit snacks/leather
• Graham crackers
• Bananas
• *Other Fresh fruit*

*Bananas are always in our house because my son will eat one almost everyday, but for other fresh fruit in our house, I tend to buy only one kind a week. I do this because in the past I would buy strawberries, blueberries, grapes, and watermelon all at once and we wouldn’t get through it all before it started going bad. Ever since I started buying just one fruit a week, it forced us to eat just that and we would eat it all before it would go bad.*

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I think that just about covers it for meal planning in our house. We have used this system for about one year now and it has worked wonderfully for us. My husband and toddler are loving the meals because we are having meals I already know they love. I feel like grocery shopping is easy because I know exactly what to get for these meals. It’s also quite simple to try something new, I just add the ingredients on my next shopping list. And if we get sick of something, it is easy to remove it from the list and just stop buying the ingredients for it.

I hope you found something in here that you can implement into your own meal planning system. This is a system that I have been tweaking over time and I feel like I have recently perfected what works in our house and for our family. Don’t be afraid to try something just to see if it works and if not, you can always tweak it to make it work for you. 

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With love,

Victoria O’Brien