I think every family does their calender a little differently. In the past I did all of my meal planning in Google calendar. I pasted the link to the recipe right in the appointment which made it easy to find. However, I wouldn’t always remember to print it out and then would have to try to cook from my phone. While not difficult, it wasn’t optimal. I never planned out lunches, which meant I winged it the day of for both mine and the girls.
I started using the spreadsheet above when I did my Whole30 and I had to plan out every meal. I tried using other people’s spreadsheets, but they were never what I wanted so I finally made my own in Google docs. I resurrected it recently and tweaked it a bit. Now I have spots for if the girls are eating home or school lunch, any activities we have that I need to accommodate, my lunches as well as our dinners. The meal plan I’m using for this month is one big pdf with all of the shopping lists and recipes, so I have that printed out paper clipped by week. I hang this on the cupboard door so everyone can see it.
I really like having all of my recipes printed out and in one folder. It’s made everything so much more simple, no more hunting around. It’s also really helped to plan out my lunches ahead of time. The meals have made plenty of leftovers which has worked well. This week I didn’t make all seven meals, cutting out the one I didn’t think the girls would like and moving the other to a lunch. Since we are only three people, we always have leftovers so I try to slot those in as well.
Also on the meal planning front, I’ve been going through my pinterest boards and deleting, deleting, deleting. I realized that I had too many things pinned I was never going to make (again), and this was making it harder to find the good recipes. It’s a long tedious process, but I’m hoping it will pay off. If nothing else, I’ve realized I can recycle this month’s meal plan with small tweaks over and over and I don’t think we would get sick of it.
Anyone have any planning tricks or tips they use?
My oh-so organized daughter!