Meal Planning Experiment 101: What I’ve Learned
When I began to contemplate how to put my 2009 resolutions into practice, I was inspired by In a garden … somewhere’s meal planning posts. So I sat down for about an hour or two, had my cookbooks at hand, and created a simple meal plan for the entire month - inputting recipes I thought were healthy, well balanced and hopefully simple to make. I planned only my dinner meals from Monday to Friday, leaving the weekend for improvised meals, relaxing, and leftovers.
It may seem too type-A organized, but actually I have found this process very simple and it has made my life so much easier and healthier! Remember that I am extremely health conscious and currently attentive to my weight and fitness, so your meal plan might be different than mine. I have interspersed my makeshift guide to meal planning with photos of my favourite meals so far (see the Flickr set for more info on the pics).
Benefits to meal planning:
- Saving money and time in your week.
- Making it more fun and easy to cook new recipes (when I go to cook, all of the ingredients are there for me).
- Eating a more nutritious diet - I have seen firsthand how easy it is with planning to get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in my diet with minimal effort; also, I have never eaten so many greens so consistently.
So how does my meal plan work?
- Breakfasts are always either green smoothies (spinach, frozen berries and bananas) or oatmeal, simplifying what I need to buy. I try to add flax seed and wheat germ to both.
- Lunches are always a hearty salad (with romaine lettuce or bok choy) full of raw vegetables, and accompanied by leftovers.
- Snacks are whole wheat pita and my favourite roasted garlic hummus, or fresh fruit.
- I make one homemade dressing for the week, to have on hand for my lunches.
- I do my grocery shopping on Mondays.
- Dinners were chosen for being as well balanced as possible. Given the way I have set up my breakfast and lunches, I look for them to have: a type of legume, healthy grain, and cooked vegetables. I try to throw in cooked dark greens as well: spinach, swiss chard, collards, kale, etc.
- Because I love sushi and it is very healthy (so good to eat seaweed), I am going to be working it into most weeks. Still have yet to master it with brown rice, but that is the goal.
- Types of salad toppings and fruits I might have in my refrigerator: watermelon, grapes, apples, cucumber, baby carrots, peppers, sprouts, radishes, etc. I find it easy to shop for “salad ingredients” and “fruit snacks” generally each week, trying to choose different things for variety.
Tips from my mistakes:
- I print out my meal plan and tape it somewhere in the kitchen close to my recipe stand.
- Try to ensure that your recipes are easy to prepare, especially on nights when you know you won’t feel like cooking (especially if you are a busy student like me!)
- As always, pre-preparing (chopping, bagging) veggies and salads makes things simpler.
- Choose recipes that have ingredients that you know will be at your grocery store; save the more complicated recipes for the weekend.
- Put in at least one day every one or two weeks that is just leftover eating.
- Likewise, you may want to schedule in a day or two in the month for eating at a restaurant.
- Keep in mind that recipes can be reworked (rearranged, replaced) on a week to week basis very easily.
Here is a sample monthly menu in PDF format; my January meal plan. And here it is in docx format for those of you who want to use it. It’s very rough, but I hope some of you find it helpful! I have definitely tweaked this for when I had too many leftovers, and rearranged recipes realizing when my very busy nights were. You can also check out my meal plan photos so far in Flickr.
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