I’ve been making a concerted effort to be a better meal-planner. Too many nights, I found myself in the kitchen at dinnertime wondering what the heck I was going to make. I’m not a fantastic anything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of cook and I also rely heavily on recipes rather than experimenting in the kitchen, so not having a plan for dinner each night was stressing me out. I started planning meals in August and am now on my second-round of planning meals four weeks at a time. Here’s the plan I came up with:
My notes about the meals are in red and I linked to the recipes if they’re available online or if they came from an online source. The links don’t work in the image above because it is a jpg file, but here’s a link to open the meal plan as an MS Word doc.
I was doing well with meeting the plan for the first week up until Friday when our family schedule got mixed around and Teeny ended up going to a friend’s house for a party and we took Tiny out for a Mommy/Daddy/Tiny date. The lucky girl got to have dinner at Whole Foods followed by grocery shopping and a trip to Target to buy paper towels. She had an awesome time. Then, because we’d had pizza at Whole Foods on Friday, I didn’t make it for dinner on Saturday. On Sunday, I caught a touch of Tiny’s stomach bug from earlier in the week and did not feel like making – or even eating – dinner. I’m still not back to normal, but I’m just grateful I didn’t get as sick as Tiny did and I’m SO GLAD she’s better. So, I’m a bit off the plan, but, if my stomach feels up to it tonight, I’m going to attempt the black beans & rice.
In another week or so, I’ll start planning the next four weeks of meals. Will that include Thanksgiving? I can’t even begin to do that math. I’ll be interested next August to look back at a year’s worth of meal plans to see how tastes change seasonally. I’m definitely craving warm foods and breads these days – bulking up for winter, I suppose!
While all of these meals will be prepared vegan-style by me, certainly they can be easily adapted for both vegetarians and non-vegetarians.
I am so impressed that you have planned out a month’s worth of meals — I have a hard time sticking to my week-at-a-time menu. Maybe it would actually be easier, though, to look at the month ahead and plan things so that we don’t eat the same meals every week. Hmmm… I might try this for October!