meal planning made easier
It all started when we got married. I thought I was pretty good in the kitchen. My parents would be out of the country for a few months of the year, and I immediately took on the role of “mother”. I came up with meal plans, made shopping lists, went grocery shopping, and came home to prepare dinner for my siblings. My brothers raved about how great a cook I was to my mom. My oldest brother even said privately to my mom that he thought I was getting to be just as good as her, the highest compliment anyone can give another in our family.
Like I said, I thought I was pretty good in the kitchen.
But nothing equals living on your own, cooking for yourself and your husband. Suddenly, it’s not just holding on until your mother can come back and take over the job. It’s seeing the cooking you do today as going on forever, or for the next 30-40 years, or however long we’ll live. I can’t lie, it was scary.
Scary, but exciting.
Suddenly, I was the one who had to make sure that we were getting our proper nutritional intake of healthy, wholesome foods. I was the one who had to ensure that what we ate didn’t consist solely of meat and carbs, but also of fruits, vegetables, greens, and fish. What’s more, I had to make it interesting. Suddenly, I was seeing food in a whole new way, where eating out was not funner than making dinner myself, where every dinner was connected to the one before it and the one after it in a bigger picture than just getting through our hunger at dinnertime.
This was what inspired my weekly meal plans. On our fridge hangs our best purchase in our apartment to date– a small “white board” (our’s is actually one of those new, stainless steel looking ones!). I didn’t know why I bought it within the first week of moving in, except that I really like to doodle. I thought it would save me a lot of paper because I would just scribble reminders to myself on that instead of on post-its, so I hung it on the frige (with adhesive tape) because naturally, that’s where I go every morning and evening. Very early on, it became where I wrote things that I needed to get from the grocery store, so I wouldn’t forget. Then I started writing random meals that popped into my head that I felt like eating that week. Soon, that developed into a linear progression of meals, which I adjusted based on what I had in the fridge. From there, I added the names of the week, and it became the center of my cooking universe, my weekly meal plan.
If you’re looking to make your own, it’s really simple and actually saves you a lot of stress in the kitchen because you always know what you’re making for dinner. It can be a daunting task at first, but so worth the time it takes to get used to it at the beginning.
Here’s how to go about making your own weekly plan:
1- Post a small white board on your fridge. Trust me, it has to be on the fridge because that’s where you begin all your cooking, right?
2- Write the names of the week, vertically or horizontally. I personally find I have a lot more space to write long food names and ingredients if it’s a vertical list, but this is up to you.
3- Plan out your weekly nutritional goals. I believe that we should have fish once a week, and a vegetarian meal once or twice a week. One day is leftovers, and the rest are meat and chicken. That’s seven days, done.
4- Here’s the part where you do what feels comfortable to you. I like to plan my specific meals after I go grocery shopping so I can see what’s in the fridge and go from there. However, I know a lot of people may find that stressful because then they don’t know what they’re looking for in the supermarket. SO! Do what you like. I like to buy whatever’s on sale or whatever looks good to me, something interesting every week, and then either think of meal ideas in the supermarket or come home, do my meal plan based on original ideas I may have or through a quick search on my favourite recipe sites (like, www.foodtv.com, www.jamieoliver.com, www.allrecipes.com) for inspiration.
5- If you work, this is where you can plan meals around what time you’ll be home. I’m a substitute teacher, so some days I’m home and some days I work, coming home at different times depending on the school. I plan the complexity of meals according to the time I’ll be home. So if I know I’m going to be at a school that requires me to come home at around dinnertime, so I don’t have much time to get the food on the table, I plan to make a really simple meal, or I make it the night before (or at least, prep it as much as possible), so there’s little to do when I get home tired and hungry.
6- Leave a corner for your grocery list. If you find you’re out of shampoo or onions or salt, you don’t want to forget these essentials the next time you’re shopping, so write it down and you’ll see it every single day which makes remembering easier.
And that’s it. I credit this weekly meal plan to getting much better in the kitchen, to expanding my ideas on dinner, and to trying out new, exciting things that have become house favourites. It all starts with a little planning.
For the past 8 years, Saturday mornings have been a mix of weekend laziness with the accompanying elaborate breakfasts and getting to school frenzy. My mother is the founder and principal of Manhal-Ul-Eman Academy, a weekly school dedicated to teaching Arabic and Islamic religious studies. Since high school, I’ve held different jobs at the school, from teacher’s assistant to office assistant to teacher.
