Meal planning is the bane of a parent’s existence during the school year. Between work, school, sports, play dates, PTA meetings, and whatever else you’ve got going on, it’s tempting to just order out or pop a frozen pizza into the oven most nights of the week. Unfortunately, that’s not good for your waistline or your wallet.
The key to making mealtime less hectic and more enjoyable — at least most school nights — is planning. No, you don’t have to use a huge color-coded meal planning calendar (unless that floats your boat). In fact, meal planning can be pretty simple and quick with options like these:
1. Freezer cook
Freezer cooking is becoming more popular in today’s crazy busy world. Basically, it’s the practice of cooking meals ahead of time and freezing them so they’re available to pop into the oven or a crockpot on a busy weeknight or lazy Saturday.
There are a bunch of ways to do freezer cooking. Some people plan a monthly freezer cooking day when they cook enough dinners for several weeks. One excellent resource for this approach is onceamonthmeals.com, which does all the freezer cooking day planning for you.
Other people just make a double batch of an easy-to-freeze meal whenever they’re already cooking. For instance, if you’re making your famous spaghetti bake for dinner one night, make a double batch. Stick the second batch in a tin pan, wrap it in foil and freeze. Then you have an almost instant dinner for a night when you don’t have time to cook.
2. Make meal baskets
If you can usually find time to cook dinner but struggle with it once in a while, meal baskets could be a great option. These are baskets that hold all the nonperishable ingredients for a meal, and they work great for pastas and canned bean-based meals.
You might make up a basket that includes dried pasta, your family’s favorite jarred spaghetti sauce and some sun-dried tomatoes to toss into the sauce. Another option would be a basket full of chili ingredients — beans, tomatoes, tomato sauce, spices, etc. If you want to get really technical about it, you could portion out the ingredients in each basket so everything is measured and ready to go.
This is a good option for quick, last-minute meals that you don’t have to think about. Rather than rooting around the pantry and fridge to see if you have ingredients for this or that recipe, you can pull out a basket and have a meal ready in minutes.
3. Rotate enjoyable meals
While you don’t want to get into a food rut, rotating meals your family likes makes meal planning easier. This is especially true if most of these favored meals are built on a few ingredients that you tend to keep around.
If you have 10 or 15 meals your family eats on a regular basis, stock up on ingredients for those meals every couple weeks. If you want, you can plan out which night you’ll have which meal. But you could always just see what sounds good on the night in question and know that you have the ingredients on hand for that particular meal.
4. Shop online
If finding time to shop is more of a problem than finding time to cook, consider a grocery delivery service. They’re popping up in cities all over the nation, and they’re great. For a low delivery fee, you can get groceries delivered to your door on a set schedule.
Bonus: Many grocery delivery services will only deliver on a set schedule. So the truck may only come to your area on Wednesdays or Thursdays or whenever. That means you are forced to do some meal planning and plan your grocery list ahead of time.
5. Involve the kids
If your kids are old enough to safely handle a hot pan, they’re old enough to participate in meal planning. In fact, putting older kids in charge of one meal per week is a great way to teach life skills they’ll use forever.
Younger kids can help plan and make simple side dishes, which takes some of the pressure off you. Older kids can be responsible for planning an entire meal once a week or every other week — which lets you completely off the hook.
Meal planning doesn’t have to be a drag, and it doesn’t have to involve an expensive system. But it might take some experimentation to figure out which of these options best suits you and your family.
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5 Cheap Ways to Streamline Dinners for the School Year originally appeared on usnews.com
