#2161 meal planning

Most every weekend, usually on Friday or Saturday, I sit down to plan meals and make a shopping list. I usually plan to cook a couple of meals on Sunday and then maybe once or twice during the week. At least that's how it's been lately because I haven't been going to the gym and my volunteer time at Red Butte Garden hasn't started yet.

The hardest thing about planning meals is figuring out what to have. I have a few go-to meals (I'm looking at you, tacos!) but I like to mix it up. I like to try new recipes every now and then, too. It can get a bit overwhelming.

One day I was flipping through Pinterest and I saw this pin about a rotating six week meal plan.  I read through it and thought about it and decided to try to come up with 30 meals that we like and that I can pretty much do by heart. I came up with 25 meals just off the top of my head. And yes, tacos were the first thing I wrote down.

I didn't break it down into the different themes that were suggested on balancingthebless.com, but I can see how the list will be helpful to me. When I sit down with my meal planning/shopping list, if I'm stuck, I can close my eyes and pick a meal and I know we're going to like it. I can pick out a new recipe here and there when I feel like it. This little experiment may need refining over time, but I like taking some of the thinking out of the planning.

Like I said, I came up with 25 ideas myself, then I put the question to the boys. They named a few things - all things that I already had on the list. MT did come up with four other ideas and T dropped in one more and those ideas led me to a few others, so I think we've got 35 or so meals on the list now. To be honest, there are some meals that have variations and I count them separately. Tacos is a perfect example because we like ground beef tacos, shredded chicken tacos and pork (carnitas) tacos. Curry is another meal with two variations: pork and chicken.

Tonight when I sat down to watch the Jazz game and make my shopping list, it was much easier than last week. Of course, I did go to Trader Joe's today so I was able to make it easy on myself with some stuff I got there.

I think I may have mentioned before how much I like Trader Joe's, right?

Happy Friday! Have a great weekend!