Meal Planning Systems

Do you meal plan? Do you have a system?

I love Kikki-K planners and they do a beautiful blue meal planner

But I much prefer to use this weekly chore planner for meal planning. 

Why? 

Well, I like to keep everything together and this planner allows me to jot down our meal plan, housework, upcoming events, groceries we are running out of etc on the one planner by replacing the "name" with the task. 

My system works like this...

The first column is "events", this is where I note the various activities and events that are happening that week... public holidays, visitors, trips out, birthdays, playgroup day etc

The second to fourth columns are breakfast/lunch/dinner. Now that I'm working fulltime again, this column is mainly just for Sat-Mon as we're at work/daycare Tues-Fri. I'm able to match the meal to what's happening that day in the events column, ie people over, going out for dinner, if we're going out after work it needs to be a quick dinner etc. 

The fifth column is "housework" and that's where I'll write things for specific days fo the week like "clean out the fridge" "bathrooms" etc. Now that I'm working fulltime, this is especially important as a little bit each day really adds up over the week and keeps the house clean while saving me time on Saturdays.

The sixth column is usually called "misc" or "other" and it's where I jot random other things like "permission slip" or "pay gas bill" 

The red column that is called "to do" is where I usually write down the things we need to buy so if I use the last bit of shampoo or we need more lightbulbs, it goes in there and then whenever I go to the shops I know what i need to buy as well as the groceries. 

It looks a bit like this... 

Although this one is incomplete. 

I also use a whiteboard system. 

In this system, the top left is what's happening this week (events and specific cleaning ie bins out, bathroom etc). the bottom left is where we note any groceries we need, top right is the menu for this week, bottom right is the other available meals that we can make without having to go to the shops- this is really handy! Sometimes something quite involved is planned but we are running late and don't have enough time or we forget to defrost something in time, it's great being able to look at this list and know we have fishfingers and chips in the freezer, or frozen pizza bases and enough ingredients to make mini pizzas etc. 

I'll write another post later about what kind of meals we plan and how we do it. 

Laura xx