Meal Planning 101: Mastering Your Meal Plan

Easy to implement strategies to make meal planning work harder so you don’t have to.

Mastering your meal plan doesn’t mean you stick to it rigidly. You wrote it, you can change it. Make sure it works for you!

You know those pictures of perfectly prepared and portioned meals? The ones you see on social media with each meal neatly packed in rectangular dishes and stacked in the fridge? Yeah, that’s not what meal planning is. Meal planning should work for you. You shouldn’t feel like you are doing more work. Goodness no; it should result in less!

So if you are thinking that meal planning looks like those picture of perfectly portioned, pre-cooked meals: let go of that misconception. Following someone else’s “system” is not going to work. And that’s an important realization to have. To really help you kick the stress out of your kitchen, you need guiding principles to structure your own meal planning system that fits your life.

If meal planning feels like it is more work, you may be overdoing it. If you haven’t yet, start by reading the post: Where to Start When Meal Planning Feels Overwhelming. And then consider the seven strategies below that can help you be the boss of your meal plan.

7 Strategies to Help You Master Your Meal Planning

Write Your Plan Down. This may seem obvious but it’s essential. Meal planning alleviates decision fatigue in the kitchen. Write down all the decisions that you made so you don’t have to think about them again. Then, keep it somewhere you can see it to easily reference. What method should you use to write it down? Use what works for you! Maybe that is a digital list in your Notes app. Or, it could be on a whiteboard in the kitchen. Or a paper you pin to the fridge with a magnet. Not sure which works best? Give something a try for a few weeks and see if it is working. If you find yourself constantly referring to the list or forgetting to use it to decide what’s for dinner, try a different method. I tried a few methods before I finally settled on a dry erase magnet that goes on the fridge.
Allow Yourself to Pivot. You are the boss of your meal plan. That means you can change it. It’s not a big deal. Meal planning isn’t a hard and fast rule, it’s a tool to help you save time and energy. Feel free to rearrange which day you make the meals you decided upon. If tacos were planned for Tuesday, but you don’t really want them until Thursday then switch it up! If you bought chicken for salads but when the day comes to use the chicken you really want to use it to make BBQ chicken pizza, pivot and make a pizza.
Batch Prep. Batch prepping helps with pivoting and can revolutionize time spent in the kitchen. Instead of making every recipe from start to end, batch prep the time-consuming components. Pre-mix salad dressings, marinades, spice blends or dry ingredients for something you want to make mid-week. Choose a “star ingredient” to prep on Sunday or Monday and have several different methods for using it. Some weeks, that’s all I do for meal planning: figure out what protein to batch prep. For example, maybe I’ll cook a few pounds of ground beef. Then, I could use any of these methods to use it as meals: rice bowls with beef and veggies, red sauce with pasta, nachos, tacos, soup, or even shepherd’s pie. Batch prep in a way that you have multiple moves to make when it comes to making meals, helping you to pivot.
Plan Your Takeout. Don’t plan yourself into a corner. If you want to go out or get takeout, plan for it. Maybe this is obvious, but some of us (hello my fellow Enneagram 1s!) need to be reminded to plan for spontaneity. I call this leaving “free plays” in the Meal Block Planner template. You don’t actually plan what you are going to get, you just leave space in the meal plan for it.

Meal planning doesn’t mean you have to make every meal. Plan your takeout!

5. Include A Meal You Can Ditch. It can be easy to over-plan. Maybe you end up with more leftover than you anticipated. Or friends stop by and you order pizza. Don’t let this derail your meal plan. Instead, plan a meal each week that you can easily ditch if something comes up. By having a list of go-tos and a pantry stocked with ingredients needed to make them, you’re in good shape to ditch something or bump it into the next week’s plan without having to throw out food.

6. Involve Your People. The kitchen should be a safe space to enjoy time with your people. So get them involved if they aren’t! Have them help make decisions, write the grocery list, make the meals, and (of course!) clean up. If you have children, involving them will help them build their own meal planning and cooking kitchen skills to be successful once they are grown. And being together doing the work of meals opens the door to conversations. Have a picky eater? Don’t miss the opportunity to discuss facing things we don’t always enjoy. Tried a recipe and it didn’t go well? Talk through disappointment and expectations. There is so much good work that can be done together in the kitchen.

7. Keep Your “Why” In Mind. Nobody is grading you for how effectively you executed your meal plan. Remember the goal is kicking stress out of the kitchen so you can enjoy making meals. As you develop a meal plan system that works for you, remember why it is you are cooking at all. Stay centered on your “why” and allow your kitchen to be a place you enjoy being.

Over time as you implement the methods from this Meal Planning 101 Series, you should start to see a change. You should be spending less time and brain power thinking about food. You should find making meals easier and more fun. If not, come back to this list and reflect on where the trouble spots are. Remember: keep it intentional, keep it simple, and use that meal plan to kick the stress out of your kitchen.

Got questions? Drop them in the comments!

Want more?

We’re talking Kitchen Essentials at The Wandering Hearth this year. In this series we are focusing on Meal Planning 101. And if you want to learn more right now, I’ve got a free meal planning template to get you started. It includes:

A quick start guide on how to meal plan
A meal plan template
A sample week of meal planning from my kitchen
Directions on how to write a detailed meal block plan
The lazy version of meal planning (no judgement here, we’ve all got more important things to do than worry about meals three times a day!)

Grab your copy below by joining The Hearthside mailing list.