Streamlined Meal Planning

Once they turn five, each of my kids begins choosing and helping to prepare one meal each week.  I work closely with each child at first, and gradually I turn over tasks for the child to perform without assistance.  How fast that happens varies from child to child and meal to meal.

Five years ago, I blogged about a new way of organizing our meal planning.  I was entering the final stages of a complicated pregnancy with a high probability of complications after the birth, and I needed the meal plans to be functional without much help from me each week.  This system, described in that earlier post, worked well for us with few changes for five years.  But this summer I decided we needed to streamline the process more as well as to shake it up a bit since we had gotten into a rut and, although the food choices were repetitive and boring, deciding what to cook each week was too time-consuming for our current schedule.

Pockets store cards not in use.

I sorted through the meal cards we had collected, discarding those we never actually made.  I made new cards for meals we did sometimes make that didn't already have cards.  I solicited suggestions from the rest of the family and added cards.  Then we went through a process of selecting various meals.  Each child got to choose seven different entrees he would like to make.  I made a list.  I took that list and sorted it so that each child had a separate column listing the seven meals, and each row had different meals for every child.  In some cases, I asked a child to replace one selected meal with something else, letting him choose the something else, so that we would have a bit more variety.

The resulting list had four columns and seven rows.  Each row had four different meals that were fairly dissimilar: no two soups or two breakfasts, etc.  I then made my own chart with three columns and seven rows, filling in dishes I would make.  I focused on things I could make in the pressure cooker, mostly, and tried not to duplicate any of the kids' choices.  My chart isn't completely filled in, but I usually don't need to make three meals each week anyway.

One clip for each day of the week.

Now I made new 3x5 cards, using a different color index card for each child.  Each week, we make the meals from the next row on the chart, so we don't have to do any choosing.  I can easily see what meals are coming up so I can plan our shopping, and I only have to decide who is cooking on which day each week (based on work and activity schedules).  I clip the cards to an organizer so everyone can see who is cooking what when for the week.

*If someone wants to change his plan for that week*, I don't mind *as long as* the new selection doesn't duplicate someone else's plan that week AND either no special ingredients are required or I am given enough advance notice to add things to the regular shopping trip.