Preemies
Weekly Meals
How do you do your weekly meal plan? Do you plan each meal out or do you fly by the seat of your pants? Do you keep up with it monthly to avoid common repeats?
I feel like I'm in a rut with my week night dinners. DH is not a fan of pasta and doesn't eat most beans/peas. It's starting to cool off, so grilling isn't an option.
Tell me how you do things at your house 
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Re: Weekly Meals
Every Sunday, I sit down at the computer with my Meal Plan Whiteboard (it sticks to the fridge). Then I go to Skinnytaste.com and Pinterest and go through the recipes I've flagged. DH WILL NOT eat certain veggies or foods so it is definitely a process. I don't overly care for repeats since DH makes it so hard to cook for (if he complained I tell him well you need to just expand your horizons and maybe the dinner would be more interesting). He has sworn that when he gets back from deployment he'll try more things (i'm skeptical LOL).
But that's what I do. I keep it on the fridge so I have to see it and can make my grocery list at the same time.
Right now all bets are off and we fly by the seat of our pants.
When I was at the height of organization and had my act together I did a ton of freezer meals. I cooked once a month and put stuff in the freezer.
If you google "once a month cooking" you will find a ton of places. This was one of the best:
https://oamc.8m.com/
Then, all we had to buy was produce and dairy. I plan on doing this again. It made life so much better. It took me about 5-6hrs to cook for the whole month if it was planned out well. Then we just had to pop food in the oven when we got home, make a salad, and we were ready to eat with minimal effort and mess.
We'll miss you sweet Debbie Girl (4.21.12) and sweet Cindy Girl (8.9.12)
We are just getting back to meal planning. I try to plan things out on Sunday so that I only have to cook every couple of days. So this week we have chicken and dumpings in the crock pot for two dinners (and maybe some lunches), then fish on salads a couple nights, and then pasta or something else cheap and fast.
One of our staples is to grill a bunch of chicken (we grill even if its cold) one night and then put it in different salads or pastas during the week. Its fast, healthy-ish, and has enough variety to work. But my DH will eat anything, I'm the picky one at our house.
Our precious girl, born at 27 weeks.
I try to meal plan monthly put it doesn't always work out. I am a work in progress with this, but one thing I am trying to do is to come up with 30 go to meals that are "favorites" in our house...So you create this list, put it in a sheet protector and mark off & date the meals with a dry erase marker when you make them so you don't have any repeats. Once you've used them all you can wipe the list off and start over. <---I haven't got that far yet lol.
But I meal plan based on whats on sale most of the time, and stock up on meat when a good sale comes a long. 75% of the time I meal plan for two weeks at a time.
Pasta is a huge hit in our house and one that we eat atleast once every two weeks, sometimes once a week. I also have two chicken dishes that have become favorites as well so I do one of those each week. I also aim for one or two crockpot meals each week, espeically if I know I've got a busy day with appts, etc.
I try to get DH involved with what he'd like but most of the time he's just "I don't care" and thankfully isn't a picky eater.
We usually do "theme" weeks. For example, chinese, Indian, mexician, soups, grilled (more so in the summer). It makes shopping easier because that half a pepper can be used in two recipes. I also tend to do one large meal like make chili, or soup, or in the summer a pasta salad that tends to get recycled for multiple meals that week. DH eats sandwiches for lunch every day (he would eat them 24/7 if I allowed it), and I usually get left overs from the night before.
Another word of advice, embrace the crockpot.
BPF May 12, 2013 :: EDD Janaury 22, 2013 :: MC Began On July 14, 2013 at 12W4D
Born at 34w2d:
Lucky girl!
I usually try to meal plan for the week, but I don't assign meals to specific days. If I'm really motivated, I use the grocery flier to figure out what's on sale and then plan meals based on that. It doesn't always happen, though.
I like cooking, so try to do a slightly more-complicated meal on the weekends when I have more time. During the week, I do a combo of easy meals, big meals that can be eaten over multiple days, crockpot stuff, and things my husband can cook.
The hardest part for us is that we have to do the grocery shopping as a family. I can't drive until the end of January because of the seizure I had in July, so my husband has to drive me to the store. That means our son has to come with us. That makes shopping a PITA. My husband shops sometimes, too, but he often gets a bunch of random stuff when he shops. Once I can drive again, I think it'll be a lot better.
Haha... this! My DH does too. He actually has a bunch of cookbooks (Cooking Light Chicken and Week Night are favs) that he uses on Sundays to meal plan then he also does all the shopping. It's awesome! I was a fly by the seat of my pants girl which always resulted in about 3 trips to the store per week.
BFP#2 3/16/11, beta 138; 4/12 Baby/HB DS born 9/10/11 at 29w4d due to partial abruption and PTL
BFP#3 8/19/13 Another boy! 17P, modified bedrest and Nifedipine helped us have a termie! DS2 born 4/19/14 at 38w5d.