For years I’ve seen every menu plan or service on Pinterest and even signed up for a few of them over the years. None worked or stuck or helped me for more than a week.

This month I decided I would give it another go, this time in my own format. It’s not fancy or feast worthy meals but, like my 3 easy dinners post, it is doable and that’s what I’m aiming for.

Step 1: Print out a calendar

I just found a free printable monthly calendar online and printed a few copies. One for breakfast, one for lunch and dinner, one for the inevitable screw ups I’d make on the first two.

Step 2: Figure out how many meals you need

I noted any dates I’d be out of town, attending an event or otherwise not need to eat at home and then multiplied that by number of people in the family. For me it’s 1 so let’s make this easy and say 30 breakfasts, 60 lunch and dinners.

One tip here, if you’re going to make meals at home, consider what you like to eat. If eating out is all tacos and burgers and curries and home meals are sad casseroles and rice and beans, you’re not going to want to cook at home.

I like to take favorites and then customize them at home. Consider that burger, even a small burger at a place like Five Guys can cost $10-15! Choose what you love most to fancy up that burger. A sesame bun? Bacon? Onion rings? Mushrooms and Swiss cheese? If you’re making it at home, go a little splashy and get the ingredients you love to make it your own. If you hate lettuce or raw onions or tomatoes that shoot out the side when you take a bite, just skip them!

Step 3: What do I want to eat?

Breakfast seems easiest so I started there. To make this even easier I decided what to eat by the day of the week.

• Sunday & Monday – eggs and roasted potatoes
• Tuesday & Thursday – smoothie
• Wednesday – Waffles
• Friday – Oatmeal
• Saturday – Breakfast casserole

Now that I had those written out on my calendar I skipped ahead to Step 4.

Step 4: Write down ingredients and check pantry

For each breakfast item I listed out the ingredients I would need and added them to my list. 5 days of waffles = 10 waffles = 1 box of frozen waffles. 4 days of oatmeal = 8 packets of oatmeal = I already have that in the pantry.

The only part I forgot about, when making this list, was that I needed eggs for the casserole and omelets but also for baking so I should always get an extra dozen.

Before I put in an order for all this food I complete step 5 so nothing is going bad sitting in my fridge. But first…

Step 3 (again)

Going back to step 3, I listed out a few things for lunches and dinners. I chose two soups, two casseroles/freezer meals and a mix of fajitas and burrito bowls along with some staples like hamburgers.

For each of these recipes, note how many servings you get. My list looked like this:

• Chicken broccoli rice casserole (16 servings)
• Lasagna (16 servings)
• Chicken fajitas (6 servings)
• Chipotle bowls with steak (6 servings)
• Hamburgers (9 servings)
• Lentil soup (6 servings)
• Potato Leek soup (6 servings)

I played around with the recipes to see what I could make the easiest and without having a brand new entree to cook every few days. I added ingredients for each of these meals to my grocery list.

Step 5: Decide when to COOK or PREP each item

This is where I failed in the past, friends. I would make a menu, even simplify it, and then on Tuesday it would say “Lasagna” and I would… not have made the lasagna. So even if I had the ingredients in the fridge, it was just easier to eat out or make some ramen.

On the monthly calendar I’d printed, I added what I needed to cook, on each day, to have the food ready to go. I included tasks like making black beans from dried in the crockpot and defrosting freezer meals. If I had a menu with 3 days of Chipotle style bowls, I needed to make rice for those meals. If I planned on chicken fajitas, I didn’t just need to buy chicken, I needed to bake it.

Step 6: Add time to the calendar

This might be a bit of overkill but I found it was really helpful. I opened up my personal calendar and added time blocks for the days I needed to cook, mostly Friday to Sundays, and listed what I was cooking each day. If I wanted to make something in the oven, I knew it was more efficient to cook a few things at once.

Step 7: Grocery shop and proportionize

To make my life a little easier, I placed an online order for the groceries so I could simply pick up and go. This allowed me to double check my list (even though I forgot the tomato sauce for the lasagna like an idiot) and get everything I needed for the first 2 weeks of meals.

Don’t just buy everything at the start of the month, it increases the likelihood of things going bad and there may not be room in the freezer, especially as you make meals ahead.

The lasagna was where I learned to proportion out the most. The recipe I used made enough for 4 pans so I had to divide the meat and sauce, the lasagna noodles, the cheese mix and the mozzarella so that the last pan wouldn’t look scant.

For the mornings when I have eggs and potatoes it’s faster to roast the potatoes the day before and reheat them so I often make the potatoes in a batch and then divide them up for the morning.

I bought a half dozen peppers to use in the fajitas, burrito bowls and breakfast casserole, and leftovers went into my scrambled eggs. If I took all those peppers and put them in the casserole I would not have enough for the other meals.

This is especially hard, I’ve found, for meats. It’s difficult to divide up a pound of steak into 6 servings for burrito bowls but unless you want to make a few of them vegetarian, it’s easiest to do in the beginning after cooking your steak.

Notes:

I am still refining my system but I’ve found a few tools are really helpful. Get a free monthly calendar printable online and go to a site like Pinterest where you can find millions of recipes very easily.

Once I selected my recipes, I printed them out because I prefer paper to a tablet or phone in the kitchen. Because everything was printed I was able to take the menus on the calendars and all the recipes and hang them from the fridge for easy access.

I know that as I continue I’ll learn more about portions and hunger, there are days when I do long workouts that I need more calories and a cup of lentil soup doesn’t cut it, even if I include a slice of bread. So I’m learning and experimenting and always have a few “go to” meals like tuna, canned soup and ramen to fall back on in a pinch.

Finally, think about more than the dish but what should go with it. The easiest example here is burgers. I bought a pack of 12 frozen beef patties but also the buns, a tomato, lettuce, made sure I had mustard and bbq sauce and little pickles. But I failed to check if I had cheese (only a few slices left!) or plan any sides for the burgers. So I roasted a few more potatoes for the side and added a salad. Summer is coming so I’ll soon have a mix of vegetables from the garden and Farmer’s Market to include!