I know I’m with most people when I say I’ve tried meal planning and have failed multiple times. I get so caught up in the week and suddenly shopping day comes and I have to come up with meals and a shopping list in what feels like a few minutes and head to the store. So, I came up with a solution that works for me.
I picked up a simple $5 calendar planner from Target and a pack of sticky notes all for less than $10. For me, the key to this was finding the right size of the sticky notes. I wanted them big enough to fit the name of the meal on it without feeling cramped for space, but small enough to fit in the calendar squares without (much) overlapping. I also chose to have my meal planner separate from my normal paper planner because I often do my meal planning on the go and wanted something smaller that I could easily take with me wherever.
This idea came from Pinterest while I was randomly browsing late one night. I came across a picture of a planner that had sticky notes in it with appointments written on the notes. Suddenly the thought of meal planning with sticky notes and a planner came to mind. I think the most appealing part of this to me was that the sticky notes can easily be moved around accordingly, which helps the Type A personality side of me.
In the back of this planner, normally I keep about 40 sticky notes with different meal choices. I generally plan ahead about three weeks at a time, but for this post, I’ll be showing you a whole month. I also only plan dinners, because we keep breakfast and lunches simple around here. This system can be easily adapted to fit those meals in, too. Since the end of July and all of August now has a meal planned, here’s the rest of my sticky notes in the back:
My husband loves Blue Apron, so we usually get a couple of meals from them a week. I usually can’t eat a whole Blue Apron meal because of my food allergies, so I’ll usually have leftovers or make myself something simple those nights. One thing I do love about making my husband his Blue Apron meals is they often pair ingredients together that I would have never thought of, so it’s taught me a bit about cooking and experimenting with new flavors. And as a bonus, our toddler usually eats their meals too. If you’d like to learn more about getting a free Blue Apron box from me, send me an email.
Another thing that also helps me is that I usually stick with theme days, such as “Meatless Monday” or “Taco Tuesday” and that helps me narrow down the choices of what we are eating for part of the week.
Here are my colored sticky notes and what they correspond to:
Blue – Blue Apron
Green – Vegan/Meatless Monday/Where’s the Meat Wednesday (hubby came up with that one)
Orange – Crock Pot/InstantPot
Pink – Leftovers/Out
Purple – Other meals
Yellow – Mexican/Taco Tuesday
For some meals, I don’t cook often, or for ones I usually pull out of a cookbook, I write the ingredients or page number on the back of the sticky. This helps me when I make my grocery list.
So, here’s what our August looks like:
One of the things I like best about this system is, even though I have weeks planned out at a time, I do my shopping weekly. So if plans to go out with friends suddenly come up I can just take that sticky note and move a couple of things around to have that meal at a time before any perishable ingredients go bad.
I hope this helps you stick to your meal planning too because it really helps save time and money even if it doesn’t feel like it at first. You will notice the change over time. Happy meal planning!
You can follow along with Claire and all her motherhood adventures on Instagram @daytodayclaire.