On Meal Planning

Last summer, when I first started to think about starting my own blog, I brainstormed a list of all the possible topics I might want to cover. I can assure you, meal-planning and recipes did not make the list and yet I am writing this post. I do not find cooking appealing and if it were up to me, I would cook the bare minimum to just subsist. However, I do love people (especially my husband!) and that has slowly led to an unexpected transformation: Although my enjoyment for cooking has not changed, my attitude towards the chore has evolved.

Lately, I have been making the effort to plan out a menu for the week before we go grocery shopping. This very recent idea was spurred on by what happened a few weeks ago when we had my parents and two of Phil’s siblings visit us. Hospitality--I discovered after I got married--is something I care about and it is usually what motivates me to push the boundaries of my comfort inside the kitchen to serve guests. In my excitement for our family’s visit, I only thought about what we were going to have for dinner. Consequently, I was shocked when I realized on Friday, just hours before my parents’ arrival, that we only had 9 eggs left and no fresh produce. What were we going to have for breakfast and lunch?! Especially once Phil’s siblings arrived! It is true, Phil could have gone to the store on Saturday morning to replenish our supplies but I did not want to take away from the little time we were going to have with my parents. After all, with the pandemic, we had minimized our grocery shopping to once a week which meant that every visit to the supermarket had to count and this, of course, takes time.

However, the Lord provided in a miraculous way, and we ended up having enough food for the weekend. Looking back, it reminds me of the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish. The Lord had compassion on me and somehow stretched the little that we had to have 32 servings in one weekend! And I only had to order take-out once, on Sunday afternoon, which had been the plan all along to acquaint my parents with our favorite neighborhood restaurant.

But I still learned a lesson. If I wanted to avoid this situation again, then I needed to be more thoughtful when it comes to meal-planning.

On Monday, after my parents left, I plunged myself into my new project. Not only did I not want to run out of food when we had guests, but I wanted to serve my husband better in having a more thought-out menu. I browsed through some ideas on Pinterest and I found a blog post that inspired me immensely. This post from Simple and Seasonal described a reusable binder method to plan a menu for the week without too much hassle. In essence, you have a template sheet of paper for all the meals in the week that you then populate with different meal ideas using post-it notes. I think that having the sticky-notes is key especially if you’re a cooking novice like me. This gave me the flexibility to move the sticky-notes around to adjust my menu when I realized we had enough leftovers to last us until Saturday, instead of Thursday, and so forth. Below is a picture of my menu after the first week!



Another thing that I like about this system is that I can write down the location of the recipe on the sticky-note. This might seem like a small thing but it makes a big difference in my daily life because I have a difficult time keeping track of our recipe books. Lastly, I placed this menu on our refrigerator for easy reference throughout the week. When you think about it, it is just a sheet of paper with a bunch of sticky notes on the refrigerator but it somehow helps me feel better prepared and equipped to make meals during the week! I might still not enjoy cooking, but I am enjoying learning about the little “tricks” that can help me become a better cook and, more importantly, a better wife and hostess. I hope this was encouraging to you as you embark on your own cooking adventures!