Planning
Because I sometimes struggle and feel overwhelmed by coming up with meal ideas, I'm using a "thematic" approach to meal planning. This helps guide my recipe search. Each week I need to make one recipe to bring for lunch and 3 recipes for dinners. Since I'm just cooking for 2 people, 3 dinners is plenty to last us through the week as we both like leftovers and Phil is fine with eating cereal one night a week if we don't have leftovers in the fridge.
I'm currently making a soup or chili to bring for lunches each week. I used to eat salads every day but in this current stage of life, salads are just too much work as there is a lot of slicing and dicing. I like that I can make a soup or chili and portion it out into 4 containers. That way I'm just grabbing a container in the morning versus assembling a salad each night. I know you can make salads ahead of time if you put the toppings at the bottom and the lettuce on top but I still feel like the lettuce gets a little "icky" by the fourth day.
For the 3 dinners, my current themes are tacos, stir fries, and curries. I don't intend to keep these themes indefinitely. They will change as we get sick of the themes but this at least gives me a starting point.
I then use my bullet journal to plan out the meals for the week. Again this is just a framework and helps me figure out what days I will make meals and what days we will have leftovers. Things definitely get shifted around depending on what is going on that night but it helps to have an idea of which nights I will be cooking.
Execution
I try to have all the recipes nailed down by Thursday night so I can start making a grocery list. Right now I do our grocery shopping on Saturday mornings when Paul is down for his nap. I'm considering trying a grocery delivery service as it would be nice to use the ~hour I spend grocery shopping doing meal prep but I haven't decided on a service to use yet and I'm concerned that the produce will be disappointing. But this is something I want to experiment with this winter.
Ideally, I would grocery shop and do as much meal prep (slicing and dicing) on Saturday and Sunday so that meals come together quickly on week nights. This past weekend we had a friend visiting so I did not do any meal prep and had to squeeze it by grocery shopping on Monday night and doing meal prep on Tuesday night. For the coming week I'm making stuffed pepper soup in the instant pot for lunches later in the week + over the weekend, and for dinners I'm making Indian butter chicken and potato curry in the instant pot and chicken and vegetable stir fry. I'm only making 2 dinners this week as we had some leftovers from last weekend and are going to grill another night this week.
The next step is to scan the recipes and figure out what you can do ahead of time. For this week's meals, I chopped up all of the chicken and vegetables, except the potatoes for the curry. Not pictured is the 3 cups of brown rice that I made in the instant pot for the stuffed pepper soup.
Now I have labeled baggies of items all set to go which should make meal prep pretty quick - especially since 2 of the recipes are instant pot recipes so require very little active time.
Future Enhancements
I received a lot of great suggestions in the comments from my last post that I want to incorporate in the future. For example, I'd like to set aside one weekend a month to make something for the freezer.
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So there you have it - there's nothing revolutionary or novel in this approach but it's a system that we are going to experiment with. It will change as our evenings change. Eventually I'll probably have to make more than 3 dinners a week, especially when Paul starts to stay awake longer and eats meals with us. But for now, this system works!
