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I have been using a six-week meal rotation for a few months now and I cannot describe how much time and energy it has saved in the dreaded meal planning endeavor we all must take part in. I have tried to find the balance between the simplicity of repeated meals and not having the same thing all the time.
Before I did this, I implemented some things for several months that helped me get to this place including:
- living on a budget with a set amount to spend on groceries every week.
- meal planning for months tweaking the hows and whens of planning, shopping, and cooking.
- trying different doable, frugal meals with my family to figure what works for all of us – me as the shopper and cook, fill up my husband, and that my kids will eat (I don’t do short orders).
- getting to the place in my family (ie: when the twins started eating table food) where I needed to plan all three meals to ensure I had a plan and enough of something to feed them all.
Even with all that routine and practice, the task of planning exactly what to cook every week still loomed over my head. So here are the steps I took to write a six-week rotation of meals.
- I made a list of dinners that we have on a weekly basis. breakfast for dinner on Thursdays, pizza on Fridays, soup & sandwiches for Sunday lunch, and Popcorn Fiesta on Sunday nights. (I try to keep things simple on Sundays. We have enough going on with getting back and forth to church and we really do aim to have family rest.)
- I found a few different lunch meals that I could rotate – different versions of mac & cheese (here and here), pb&j, pizza pockets, ham & cheese rollups, quesadillas.
- I selected a few different breakfast meals that I could rotate – cereal, pancakes, waffles, baked oatmeal, muffins, baked egg cups.
- For Saturdays, I planned leftovers for lunch and thought of a few different ideas for dinner – grilled wings, hot dogs, sandwiches, or out to eat at one of our favorite kid-friendly restaurants.
After plugging all that in, there were only 3 weeknight dinners left to fill in each week. So, then the goal was to make a list of 18 different dinners that we eat and enjoy. This included 3-5 seasonal meals (soups and stew for fall/winter, meats on the grill and summer vegetables for spring/summer). It wasn’t as hard as I thought to come up with that many meals that I cook. Then I looked over the plan and added in fruits, vegetables, and other sides.
Here is how my Six-Week Meal Plan ended up. You’ll notice we have dinner size meals at lunchtime and lunch size meals in the evenings. You can read more about that here. The other huge thing that helps me in this is using Plan to Eat, an online meal planning service. I saved these menus in Plan to Eat and then each week I just select one of the menus and load it into the calendar and it gives me the plan for the week and a shopping list. Investing the time in these steps saves me hours each week!
*If you want to modify my spreadsheet to make your own plan, just click File, then Make a Copy. Then you can change it however you want and save it in your account. (If you don’t already have a Google account, now is a great time to get one!)
What do you do to simplify your meal planning process?
This is an excellent idea! Menu planning is one of my most dreaded tasks, and all too often I fall into the pattern of preparing the same old thing (especially with lunches). I’ll definitely be brainstorming on ways to make this work for me!
I totally understand, Judy! I get stuck in ruts for sure! I have really enjoyed the six-week rotation because I feel like it gives us enough variety where we’re not too bored with the meals, but enough repetition to bring simplicity in planning. After going through this rotation a few times, I am ready to switch some things up though. So now I’m looking for new recipes.