This is an enjoyable way to form a habit:
When you adapt your daily planning, let that be reflected in your calendar.
Give every euro/dollar a job!
I sometimes miss a workout. There, I said it.
Two things are true in parenting all the time. I can be frustrated and grateful at the same time.
I wouldn’t exactly call this meal prep, but WE MADE SUSHI!!! It was delicious… 😋
This past Thursday (the 17th) was William’s 3rd birthday! 😍 Happy birthday to our little (not so little), kind of big boy!
I often get asked how much time budgeting takes, realistically speaking. The short answer is that it takes an amount of time that is totally worth it given the money it will save you and the peace of mind it will buy you.
I answered the question practically by breaking down my budgeting routine:
Some more thoughts from this week:
A hierarchy of priorities can help resolve conflicts in the heat of the moment and help you choose wisely.
Create a habit by using accountability.
I prioritize sleep (because it makes everything better), and I often adapt my daily planning according to my sleep needs.
Two things are true: I’m nervous, and I’m excited.
William’s favorite outing: a trip on the train!
We are doing meal prep, and these are William’s lunches for the week (Monday-Wednesday).
At our home, we cook almost all our meals, including, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and only cook 3 times a week. How do we do that?
The first step is to plan out our upcoming week (we do this during our Weekly Review). We look at our calendars and see when/if we’ll be eating out during the upcoming week. On average, each of us eats out once a week. The rest of the meals we will prepare at home.
Then, we open up the food planner. It’s a spreadsheet that lists what each of us is going to eat when in the week and also what we need to do each day in terms of meal preparation. You can access my sample food planner spreadsheet here, and this is what it looks like:
We have three cook-up sessions: Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday evenings. The Sunday session is the biggest, so it lasts for about 2 hours. The Tuesday one is the shortest, and it takes about 1 hour, while the Thursday one is medium, lasting about 1.5 hours.
On Sunday evening, we cook:
On Tuesday evening, we make:
On Thursday evening, we make:
We usually eat out on Friday or Saturday evening, so we don’t prep for that meal.
On Sundays, we cook together. When we’re both in the kitchen, it’s fun because we talk about all kinds of things. We usually prepare variations of the same (favorite) meals, so we know what we’re doing with little discussion. But when we decide to try a new recipe, we need to coordinate a bit more and discuss the different steps.
An important consideration is not to get in each other’s way. For this reason, we have two chopping stations (luckily, we have a big kitchen counter) with two chopping boards (one for each of us) and multiple knives.
The way we have divided responsibilities, Jacob chops most vegetables and takes care of things cooking on the stove or in the oven. That’s a lot of work, but, luckily, he’s faster (and dare I say more skilled?) than I am in the kitchen, so he handles it well.
I grate vegetables in the food processor (carrots and apples for a salad and cauliflower for cauliflower rice). I prepare the salad dressings and other mixtures (e.g., egg mixture for frittata). I also make dessert (e.g., chop up apples to bake in the oven with cinnamon or make sweets from dates).
We can’t always cook together, though. Jacob has irregular working hours, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays he cooks during the day and works in the evenings, while I cook in the evenings after work. We know beforehand what each of us needs to make that day, so we do it in our own time.
I should also mention storing food. It’s important to store food in a way allows it to stay good and also so you can see what’s in different containers.
We recently bought lots of glass containers, which have the benefit of being transparent, so we can see at a glance what’s in there, and they also don’t leak health-damaging ingredients into our food in the way that plastic containers do. Glass containers are an investment, but I highly recommend them, especially if you like to heat up your food in those containers (for instance, your lunch at work; it’s really not a good idea to heat up food in plastic containers in the microwave because the plastic leaks into your food and messes with your hormonal health, even if the containers are BPA-free). Once we prepare the food, we store it into these containers and put it in the fridge or freezer.
We prepare our lunches in this way, so they’re easy to grab in the morning. I also put our salad dressing in little glass containers, so we take those and pour the dressing over our salad at work instead of doing it beforehand and then eating soggy salad.
I can imagine that elaborate food preparation may sound intimidating if you’ve never done it before, but it only takes a couple of iterations to get the hang of it. We spend almost no time on the actual food planning anymore (5-10 minutes a week depending on whether it’s an irregular week) because we have a routine we like.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there are lots of food prep platforms that can help. I’m aware of a couple: Paleo Leap Meal Plan and Nom Nom Paleo Meal Plan. These tools can save you lots of time, effort, and trial-and-error while you’re still getting used to meal planning, but they are paid. So you need to think what makes the most sense for you to do.
Our food preparation has a couple of stages:
It feels amazing to me to cook three times a week but have food ready for every single meal of the week (it only needs to be warmed up). It’s delicious because we eat food we love, but it also saves so much time!
Would you like to try our Food Planner? Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Do you have a different way of handling your cooking, or perhaps you don’t meal prep at all? Let me know by commenting below or on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Photo from Marisha Manahova
A Good Life 