Philadelphia Nesties
kross605
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Meal Planning Tips
How do you do it? Im on a seemingly never ending quest to get it together and meal planning is one area that I continually fail at. Ive done meal planning off and on for years but I never seem to get in a groove thats maintainable. I need some tips for a streamlined process that I can manage week after week because this nightly tradition of standing in front of the fridge in dinner indecision while its beeping at me to close the door is getting maddening.
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Re: Meal Planning Tips
I don't really have any tips for you but I have to say that before Pinterest, I'm not sure how we did not starve and die.
I've been pinning all kinds of things lately. I'll write out all the ingredients I'll need for the entire week at one time and then I'll shop for them so this way when I'm ready to come home from work and make it, everything is already ready to go.
This may sound silly but I jot down on a post-it or notebook, all the meals for the week. Sometimes I can plan ahead and go grocery shopping, but by Wednesday I forget what meals I had planned to make. Or, I'll forget that we have frozen meatballs or pasta sauce in the back of the freezer. It's kind of like a menu that I glance at, instead of standing in front of the open fridge each night. My list this week looks like this:
chicken fingers/wraps
frozen pizza
leftover meatloaf in freezer
chicken and zucchini thai curry
lemon/basil whole wheat pasta
What Heather said
I try and plan out a few meals for the week, food shop for the ingredients I need and it's there ready to be cooked. I try and do 3 bigger meals and have leftovers a few nights too. I always have on hand though the usual spaghetti, hot dogs and hamburgers on standby for my lazy nights.
Ditto this. First, I go through the freezer and fridge to see if there is anything I can build a meal around. Then I'll go through recipes and pull a few out and make a list of all the ingredients I need, trying to use a couple of the same ingredients for a few recipes so I'm buying less and not wasting as much.
Planning ahead really helps cut back on eating out/take out because I already have the ingredients at home ready to use. Sometimes I'll swap recipes during the week but it's easy since, again, I already have the ingredients.
To save time when cooking, pull out all needed ingredients first and prep them so they are ready for use- chop, measure out liquids, etc. Also to save time, try and prep ingredients for other recipes ahead of time. For example, if you need an onion chopped for that night's recipe and the next night's recipe, chop both at the same time and store one for the next night.
#1 12.11.11
#2 10.23.13 EDD
i am borderline nuts, i made a spreadsheet. columns are day, ingredients, category (produce, canned, frozen, meat, dairy....), have, and need. so i plan for each "day" but i don't religiously stick to eating it that day, list the ingredients/category and before i shop i look in the fridge and pantry to see if i actually need the ingredient or if i already have it. that way when i c&p into my grocery list i only buy what we need. the list and recipes then go on the fridge so when i know what i want that day i grab the needed ingredients, recipe and go.
i am also a fan of using produce for multiple meals in a week. we bought a big tub of baby spinach so it will be in a soup and as a side this week. or last week we used leftover london broil in quesedillas.
the spreadsheet was a pain in the azz the first few shopping trips but now it is old hat and our cabinets are actually pretty close to empty when i shop every 2 weeks. i do a shopping trip in the middle for produce but that one is really easy.
I think you are all meal planning very similarly to what I used to do and the problem is officially not my technique, its my lazy a$%. I cannot work up the energy to go through the process of routing around the homestead, skimming the grocery store sale ad, inventing or researching corresponding meals and/or recipes, creating a grocery list and matching coupons. Im going to have to file this under "no easy tricks" as well as "being an adult sucks" and just get back in the saddle. Im guessing Ill thank myself at some point, but its not today.
Thanks for the ideas. Maybe I can at least streamline the process a bit. I pretty much can picture my fridge/pantry and its contents in my head so thats a start!
Why don't instead of planning an entire week, you start slow by planning 1 day a week. Or do something like 1 day during the week and then 1 day during the weekend. This way it will make you feel better about your meals. If you have 1 meal a week to look forward to and to go all out with, you may feel a little less lazy. That's how I started. It's hard to plan an entire menu for the week and even harder to deal with the pressure of sticking to is. Without fail, no matter how much I plan, things always get messed up during week nights between me having to stay late at work, DS's after school activities, etc.
Due to our always changing schedules, sometimes when I plan meals for the entire week and shop for those meals, things go bad and get wasted bc I just don't have enough time to make the recipe. I'd say start our slow and do 1 good meal a week. Then bump it up to 2 and so on.
A lot of girls swear by crock pots, too. I feel like with a lot of the crock pot recipes, you really can't go wrong. Just toss pretty much anything in there and you're good to go.