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Quite a few years ago, we realized the way had been doing dinners was flawed. Having lots of ingredients on hand so you can whip up whatever you feel like is great, but it requires inspiration and sometimes planning. Too often we fell into "It's 6 PM, I don't know what I want to have, let's get Chinese food."
So we started weekly meal planning. Near the end of the week we make up a shopping list, and most of the time involves plotting out the coming week's meals. I get bored very quickly if all the meals are similar ("meat and salad" can only happen a couple times in any given week, even if the meats are different like fish and chicken). I also try to look at the calendar and think through the week to see how much work I am willing to do. When I was Kingdom Exchequer (drink!) many more of the meals were simple and/or "the wife puts most of this together" because I didn't have much spare time or bandwidth.
I don't plot out when most of those meals will happen. We typically decide the night before. That allows the wife, who likes more spontaneity, to make changes on the fly. But it's also not locked in - last night I suggested we postpone today's meal because it would create lots of leftovers, and we already have several lunches' worth in the fridge. Instead I'm making a salad with leftover beefsteak. It's important to allow for changes when a meal that sounded good the previous Friday just doesn't appeal... we had onion soup on the list for two successive weeks before taking it off the dinner plan for now.
Not triggered by anything in particular. It's worked well for us for probably 20 years.
So we started weekly meal planning. Near the end of the week we make up a shopping list, and most of the time involves plotting out the coming week's meals. I get bored very quickly if all the meals are similar ("meat and salad" can only happen a couple times in any given week, even if the meats are different like fish and chicken). I also try to look at the calendar and think through the week to see how much work I am willing to do. When I was Kingdom Exchequer (drink!) many more of the meals were simple and/or "the wife puts most of this together" because I didn't have much spare time or bandwidth.
I don't plot out when most of those meals will happen. We typically decide the night before. That allows the wife, who likes more spontaneity, to make changes on the fly. But it's also not locked in - last night I suggested we postpone today's meal because it would create lots of leftovers, and we already have several lunches' worth in the fridge. Instead I'm making a salad with leftover beefsteak. It's important to allow for changes when a meal that sounded good the previous Friday just doesn't appeal... we had onion soup on the list for two successive weeks before taking it off the dinner plan for now.
Not triggered by anything in particular. It's worked well for us for probably 20 years.
