People are constantly asking me “How do you do it?”. They’re curious how we make our family work with the hundreds of activities that are going on each week. Our kids are so busy, my wife is crazy busy, and I’m just a mess. It’s a valid question though. Everyone is looking to find ways to make it through their busy schedules, always searching for that one silver bullet that will make everything better.

Sorry, you’ve come to the wrong place.

I simply don’t have one silver bullet that will fix everything. I wish I did, it’d make life a heck of a lot better. But what I can offer are little tips and tricks that we use to make an attempt at having a reasonable life. It’s still quite a work in progress, but some of my tips might help you out in a particular way. If I can save you just a couple minutes every week, who knows what amazing thing you could do?

This week, I’ve decided to start at the most basic level in our kitchen, namely: Meal Planning. Every week, usually on a Sunday, I sit down and put together the meals that we’re going to have for the week. I do this in conjunction with my weekly review of the upcoming activities. The idea is to know what meals are to be made every day, and coordinate that production with my availability while balancing the size of the meal based on how many people will probably be at the table. I say probably because at Hectic Manor, you never know who will have to work an extra shift or who will bring somebody home for dinner.

I’ve never really used a meal planning app or website. It’s something I’ve thought about, but haven’t gotten around to. I’d love to say “yet”, but I just don’t know. I use a pretty simple spreadsheet, and I’ve been using it, on and off, since the beginning of 2008. It all started when we decided to take a family vacation to ski in Colorado. We spent a number of months planning the adventure, and it seemed to be a natural outcropping to plan what meals we were going to have. Just because we were on vacation didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to have to cook. Since we were in a fully stocked condo, I figured I might as well make the meal prep as painless as possible.

Over the years, our meal plan has evolved. I seldom plan three meals a day, although we’re headed back to that. I regularly shop from a list that’s been generated from the meal plan…but I buy many items that are on sale that aren’t on this week’s plan. I also have had a hard time scaling back my cooking to accommodate a household that’s just over half the size that it was in our heyday. We have a lot more leftovers, and I’m still struggling with efficiently using them in a family that isn’t very keen on eating reprised meals.

With all that in mind, we actually plan out roughly five dinners a week and let the other two dinners either be leftovers (which I carefully call anything else other than leftovers), meals brought in, or a more impromptu creation.

I would love to claim that every meal is quick to prepare, highly nutritious, well-balanced, and beautiful in it’s presentation. But this is the Hectic Dad blog…so there are some nights where I not only don’t hit all four of those goals. Shoot, there are nights where I fail on all four counts. More often than not I high two of three of them. I’m also not very good about making desserts, so our meal plans seldom have a dessert planned, unless I can cajole one of the the kids into making dessert. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t lack for desserts at Hectic Manor, they just don’t tend to make it onto the plan. One of my goals for the second half of 2015 is to do better in that regard.

I’d also love to say that I use our meal plan every week. It’s something that I try to do, but I fall off the wagon like everyone else. But since early 2008, I find myself gravitating back to meal planning because it works. When I have a well constructed, well though-out plan our week goes much smoother. I don’t find myself making ten stops at the grocery store. I don’t find myself standing in the kitchen at 5PM trying to figure out what I can make for dinner. I don’t forget to defrost things. And quite honestly, we eat better with far less waste when I have a meal plan!

Foundational Thoughts

If you’ve decided that you want to start meal planning, don’t try to do three meals a day for every day of the week. Pick the one meal that will make the most impact on your life. For me, it’s know what I’m making for dinner. That takes the most preparation, not just in terms of the meal prep itself, but in defrosting and shopping. I also have a lot of recipes that require marinating. You simply can’t speed that process. Nor can you rush a slow-cooker meal. They’re called slow-cookers for a reason, duh! I’ve learned some tricks about slow-cooking frozen foods, and they’ll probably be the subject of another post.

If breakfasts are hard for you to get on the table and you find yourself shoving PopTarts into the kids hands as they walk out the door too many days in a row…then breakfast might be a meal that you want to plan out. Or if lunch is your nemesis, use that. But from experience, I wouldn’t recommend trying to plan out all three meals. It’s great while you’re doing the planning, and you’ll feel really in control when you have your ready-made shopping list. But when it comes execution time it’s hard to go from totally freeform, unplanned meals to structured and planned events. You may feel overwhelmed, I know I was.

In addition, the first couple weeks have all your favorite recipes handy. Don’t try too many new things. I have this terrible habit of collecting recipes in all forms: From magazines, websites, cookbooks, friends, backs of cans/boxes. Then I have twenty new recipes that I want to try, all in the same week. Believe me when I warn you that if you shake up your meal routine that much, your family might lynch you. Don’t believe me, I still have the rope they brought to the kitchen one night demanding that I quit experimenting on them! I meant well, but I threw too many changes to their culinary experience onto the table…and it failed miserably.

Setting the Landscape

I try to do our meal planning on Sundays. That tends to be the day that I’m looking forward at the rest of the week anyway, and I’ve got all the other constraints in my head. Or at least I should have them all in my head. It also helps that I do a weekly review of activities that are upcoming, so I can get an idea of who’s going to be around for which meals, any visitors that might be coming, and generally how much time I’m going to have each day to prep meals.

One of my goals for the latter half of of the year is to do more bulk prep of both ingredients, recipes, and even entire meals and the most likely day for this is Sunday. There’s nothing magic about Sunday other than I have enough time to wrap my head around all the different inputs that will go into meal planning.

So the first step in our meal plan is to outline the landscape of what is going on. I color code the notes section of our meal plan, and sometimes the header for each meal. This allows me a quick glance without having to constantly go back to the calendar to see what’s going on while I’m planning the meals.

Because we’re such an active family, I put in any sports or other activities that we have going on. For instance, this week Hectic 12 is competing in the YMCA Nationals Gymnastics meet in Wichita. That means that my meal preparation will be impacted, since I’ll be in Wichita a large part of the day. If it was the Fall or Winter I’d be making a slow-cooker meal, but with temperatures hovering near 100 I’ll have to come up with another plan.

We also have swim lessons going on for Hectic Grandson every night this week. Since he’s a toddler, that means that Hectic Grandma is in the pool with him while Hectic 25 (his mom) is simultaneously teaching another swim class. Hectic 18 teaches swim lessons all week as well, and caps off Wednesday with her sand volleyball league.

Finally, almost everyone in the house is running in the Firecracker 5k on Saturday morning. This means that I should plan a big breakfast for after the race as my crew will return home hungry.

We don’t call it the Hectic Household for nothing!

Once I’ve got the activities onto the meal plan, then I start considering who will be at our meals and who will be missing. I try to take into account when we’ll be eating. While I would love to move our mealtime to 5:30 or 6:00, I haven’t been successful. We try very hard to eat as a family, so our meals tend to be much later in the evening. We started eating dinner after swim team practices when the kids were younger, so it’s not uncommon for us to have dinner at 8:00 or even 9:00pm. Of course, that means that a snack might be indicated earlier in the evening. I’m still considering adding an Evening Snack section to our plan. The idea would be to keep the kids off the Hot Pockets and Double-Stuf Oreos and provide them with something healthier. My tentative plan is to start this after the college kids have left, when we’ll have a paltry six of us in the house. Should be a snap then, eh?

For now, dinners are planned for 8:30 on nights when there are swim lessons, so Monday through Thursday we’re eating late. Friday through Sunday we’re a bit more flexible. To complicate matters, Hectic 19 and his girlfriend will be in town for the race and his birthday. They’re both college athletes, so I need to provide a lot more food when they’re around! In addition, Hectic 16 is leaving for the Congress of Future Scientists on Sunday so he won’t be here for Sunday’s meals.

Main Courses

At this point, we haven’t actually done any meal planning. All we’ve done is set the landscape for who’s going to be around and when the meals will be served. But those are important first steps, without them I tend to over-produce by a lot. That means the dreaded “L” word: Leftovers. So it’s better to plan ahead and keep the leftovers to a minimum.

I also try to balance our main courses for dinner between chicken, beef, pork, seafood, and vegetarian. We eat a lot of pasta and rice, so those are mixed in quite frequently. I also try to balance meals that take a lot of preparation and those that are quick and easy to prepare. Finally I try to incorporate one or two new recipes every week, hoping to find something that my family will eat again.

The first pass through our meal plan is to set the the main courses for dinner. I try to keep the same meat from appearing on the menu twice in the same day, or two days in a row. Therefore, if we’re having BLT sandwiches for lunch, we usually won’t have bacon for breakfast. If we’re having roasted chicken for dinner, we won’t have chicken strips for lunch. You get the idea.

I also try to vary the method of preparation and cooking to fit the amount of time and/or energy that I expect to have that day. When we’re running around like crazy, it’s nice to have a slow-cooker meal that I put together that morning (or even the night before) cooking all day long. Then at dinnertime there’s very little else to do. Slow-cooker dinners are a bit less desirable in the Summer, but breakfasts still work well. I’ll let them cook overnight and we’ve got a hot meal ready to go as each person is ready to head out the door. Genius!

Side Dishes

Quite honestly, I start with the main course for the meals most of the time because they’re the easiest for me to select. I’ll look at a day and decide that I want chicken. Then I either have a recipe come to mind (for instance Homemade Chicken Pot Pie has been requested by Hectic 12 for the last two weeks) or I’ll search my cookbooks for a suitable entrée. These act as the anchor points for the meals, and allow me to adjust the side dishes on each of the days so they don’t conflict. While we don’t want to eat Chicken five days during the week, the Hectic Crew would mutiny if we had Rice five days a week too!

To that end, I make a second pass through the meal plan adding side dishes. I usually add any carbohydrate heavy items at this point, so rice dishes, potatoes, pasta, and breads are all considered at this point. Sometimes I’ll add “Need a Rice Dish” and then I’ll highlight that cell in the spreadsheet in red so that I remember that I need to decide on a recipe for this day.

Vegetables

Once the side dishes and breads are selected, I’ll make a pass adding vegetables and fruits to the menu. I do these together to try and maximize the use of the fresh items that we’ve bought or plan to buy. Often I’ll schedule my shopping trip for the week around when I need the freshest items.

The Hectic Crew is a bit picky on the vegetable front, so I’ve been working really hard to try out new recipes in this area. To date I haven’t been very successful at adding many of them to our permanent rotation, but we’re making a bit of progress. Now that we’re in the height of Farmer’s Market season, I’m hoping that we’ll get a few more fresh vegetable dishes that I can use regularly.

Desserts

Desserts are the last item that I add to the meal plan. Frankly, I’m really bad about making desserts, so we have a lot of days where desserts are comprised of whatever’s in the pantry, fridge, or freezer. Desserts tend to take me a lot of time, so unless I can con one of the kids into making a dessert they simply don’t get added to the meal plan. This has been causing me a lot of stress lately, as I’m having to come up with a dessert idea on the fly…so scheduled desserts are another one of my goals for the latter half of the year.

Breakfasts

About this time in the process I realize that I’ve neglected breakfasts badly. I’ve gotten in the bad habit of writing MYODB on a lot of the days. The kids were disappointed everyday that they saw this, but didn’t know what it stood for until one of them asked. Make Your Own Damned Breakfast was my smart-aleck reply.

I’m working towards having more planned breakfasts with the goal of not having to take much time in the morning to prepare breakfast. This will let me concentrate on content creation in the early morning. This tends to be my most productive time, and having to stop and make breakfast for myself and the kids significantly impacts my productivity. Since early morning is also one of the few times that I can grab some uninterrupted work time, I need to make the most of this time.

A large amount of my recipe experimentation has arisen among breakfast foods. We’re still working our way through deciding how much food to make in the morning. Not everybody here is a breakfast person. In addition, we have family members leaving the house over a wide time spectrum, so the food has to be ready early, but stay hot and appealing for quite a while. Those are some difficult constraints!

Lunches

During the summertime, I try to plan out at least some of our lunches. I do my best to incorporate components that may be left over from prior dinners. The varied times of breakfast are echoed at lunch time, so I often have somebody eating as early as 11:00 while the last lunch isn’t consumed until nearly 2:00. We’re trying to focus on lighter lunches that don’t all involve a sandwich.  Using a meal plan has allowed me to be a bit more creative than I would normally be, since I get into meal planning mode and can focus on what sounds good for later in the week, rather than scrambling around in the late morning trying to figure out what to feed everybody.

Final Thoughts

One of the biggest advantages to using a meal plan is that we’re able to adjust our meals to the time available, energy required for preparation, and people who will be in attendance. We’ve cut our leftovers down considerably. I’ve also made some meals in a larger size with the intention of freezing the meal for later. Recently I began logging these pre-prepared meals so that I wouldn’t have to go hunting through the freezers to find them. Hopefully this trick will pay off, at present we’re still doing a lot of searching through foil-wrapped and zipper-bagged meals trying to figure out what to add to the meal plan.

Another huge advantage is that everybody has access to our meal plan, so they know what’s coming. If a new conflict arises and someone is going to miss their favorite meal, we can adjust the schedule as necessary.

Finally, I spend a lot less time standing in the kitchen trying to come up with a good idea for dinner, only to be thwarted because one of the key ingredients isn’t here or isn’t defrosted. We’ve also cut down on the emergency trips to the grocery store. I’m doing a better job taking advantage of sales of ingredients and then incorporating them into foods over the next meal plan.

While it’s not rocket science, there is a methodology behind my meal planning.