Hellobee

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a meal planning post, but it has taken me months to get around to it. Honestly, it just seemed overwhelming and a bit of a categorical nightmare. How could I explain concisely the steps we take to save money? save time? and still feast? Because how that happens is really an ever-changing and precarious balancing act.

I also wanted the information I put out there to be useful, but I realize that the way I plan and execute our weekly meals isn’t going to be replicable for a family with different work schedules, dietary restrictions/preferences, budgets, and comfort level or even desire to be in the kitchen.

In the end, I thought I’d share the overarching tenets of our meal planning philosophy and strategy. Hopefully some of the tips in here are helpful to you. I’ll toss them in the air, and you can catch the pieces that make your life a little easier, a little more enjoyable, and maybe even a little more delicious.

We do one big shopping trip a week at our local food co-op (where I work a shift every other week). I maintain a grocery list on my phone (nothing fancy – I just use the Notes app), and at any given time it will include foods from one of four categories:

1. Weekly items. These are items I buy almost every week. I love to experiment with food but there are a handful of meals that are both easiest and most economical for us, so we tend to eat those often, with a few special or interesting meals sprinkled in between.
2. Pantry staples. Any pantry staples we are running low on/out of get restocked along with the weekly items. My grocery list is especially helpful for remembering these.
3. Recipe-specific ingredients. These are foods needed for either a recipe I’m developing for work or just something we really want to eat.
4. Seasonal. Fruits or vegetables that either overlap with the recipe-specific category above or are just items we want to enjoy solo that time of year. For example, we are getting local strawberries weekly right now, even if they aren’t for any particular meal.

Here is what my grocery list typically looks like:

Weekly Grocery List

Whole chicken
Ground meat
Eggs
Milk
Yogurt
Carrots, sweet potatoes, and/or winter squash
Dark, leafy greens
Avocados
Bananas
Any pantry staples we’re running low on (see below)
Recipe or seasonal ingredients

Pantry staples

Peanut butter (Who am I kidding – we fly through this stuff so it’s almost always on the grocery list.)
Dried beans and legumes (especially black beans, chickpeas, and lentils)
Dried grains (especially oats, rice, and polenta)
Nuts and seeds (including chia seeds)
Canned tomatoes
Canned sardines
Dried fruit
Frozen peas
Olive oil, butter, coconut oil
Cinnamon
Chocolate

I don’t specifically plan out all the meals for the week. Like I said above, there are some basic meals that we eat on a very regular basis, and then I pick maybe 2-3 meals or dishes (often work assignments) that are more adventurous or at least different to keep things interesting and give me a chance to play around in the kitchen. These are the tips I’ve developed over time to make my meal planning most efficient, whether to make our food budget more affordable or to save time in the kitchen (or often achieve both goals!):

• Roast a whole chicken weekly. It’s endlessly adaptable, requires little hands-on time (see below for my easiest roast chicken), and I can get 3-4 meals out of it (making it time and cost-efficient). We eat two meals of the meat, and then every week I make chicken stock and use it to make a large pot of soup or, on occasion, risotto.
• Eat eggs. We eat a LOT of eggs, both because they make for a quick meal and are an inexpensive and vitamin-rich protein source. Sometimes dinner is as easy as sautéed vegetables topped with a fried or poached egg. We also eat frittatas, omelettes, and even scrambled eggs for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
• Eat beans and grains. Also inexpensive and a good way to stretch expensive meat, vegetables, and fruit. For example, if  we just eat ground beef and vegetables, my husband, 15-month-old, and I will eat a pound of ground meat in one sitting. With beans and/or grains as part of the meal, a pound of meat lasts 2-3 meals.
• Buy and cook in bulk. This can be applied to any number of ingredients, but I find this especially helpful for beans and grains. One day a week, usually Sunday, I make time to cook large batches of beans and grains. I soak them overnight, cook them on the stove top, and then once cooled I refrigerate what we can eat that week and freeze the rest. When it comes to bulk more generally, the best prices at our co-op are in the bulk section.
• Pick a theme. I find that the extras are what really adds up, so it helps if every week I pick a kind of “theme” to spice up our meals. For example, I might buy cilantro, lime, and ginger and work these into regular, basic dishes. Maybe the next week I buy feta cheese, high-quality olives, and roasted red peppers. This way, we get variety throughout the month without buying too many specialty ingredients each shopping trip.
• Plan ahead. This can mean different things, but for me this means thinking roughly about our meals ahead of time (not necessarily down to the day, but having a handful of dishes in mind) and “shopping” in advance. I can do some of my shopping before I get to the actual store because our co-op has a produce list online updated weekly with availability and prices. I look at the list for inspiration and practical reasons because it tells me both what we are getting from local farmers (seasonal produce is my muse!) and the pricing.
• Be flexible. One of the reasons I don’t plan every meal down to the day is to give us freedom to cook what we might be in the mood for or what we have time to prepare. Sometimes we’ve all eaten large lunches and would prefer to eat something simple and light for dinner, or sometimes the day just gets away from me and we order takeout. I’d say we end up going to a restaurant or ordering delivery about one night during the week and for at least one meal every weekend. Having that flexibility helps make meal planning a little more relaxing. Also, we recently moved to a neighborhood with lots of inexpensive and amazing ethnic food that we definitely want to take advantage of while living here!
• Get comfortable in the kitchen. Investing the time to learn cooking techniques is infinitely valuable. I’d love to write more about this sometime because I am so passionate about it. When I graduated from college I had little in the way of kitchen skills. As a perfectionist, the process of learning to cook was frustrating for me and now I am so, so grateful to have the skills to transform almost any raw ingredients into a delicious meal. It means making meals from scratch using whatever ingredients are the most affordable is not stressful for me, and makes eating on a budget actually enjoyable.
• Make quality and flavor a priority. I realize this is not an option for everyone, but in our case  we have a budget but also the wiggle room to place a financial emphasis on our food. We eat sustainably-raised meats and other animal products and lots of organic fruits and vegetables, and buy local (which is sometimes less expensive and sometimes not) more often than not. As a former farmer with a fascination with food and the land and waters it is grown and raised in, this is important to me. It means that if I have to decide between other extravagances and forking over the extra money for locally-grown asparagus during its brief season, I am going to choose the latter.

I am sure there are many things we do that I am missing here, and if I think of any that could be particularly helpful I will come back and add them. In the end, everyone has to find their own food rhythms that make sense for their particular circumstances, and this is what has worked for us. For more ideas, I am enjoying following Mrs. Sketchbook’s Getting Back to Budget series.

I want to leave you with my method for roasting a chicken. It’s a bare-bones technique inspired by (but pared down from) Chef  Thomas Keller’s roasted chicken. It forgoes some of the oft-recommended steps, such as bringing the chicken to room temperature and trussing the bird – yes, these suggestions can take it to the next level, but you do not have to do them to enjoy a crispy-skinned, succulent bird. If all the extras are standing in your way of regularly roasting a chicken, either because you don’t have the time or find them intimidating, just skip them. My way is to salt the chicken, and put it in a really hot oven, both to beautifully brown it and get it to the table faster.

The only step you might want to add to the recipe below is if you are planning to serve potatoes or root vegetables with the meal, then chop them into 1-inch pieces, toss with a glug of olive oil and big pinch of salt, and top with the chicken prior to roasting. You’ll save time and the vegetables with cooking in the fat rendered from the chicken, making them especially delicious.

Easiest Roast Chicken

1 4-5 lb chicken
kosher or sea salt

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F. Remove any giblets from the chicken (and save for future use), and place the bird onto any roasting pan or skillet it will fit in. Sprinkle the top and bottom of the chicken generously with salt.

2. Move the pan to the oven and roast until the chicken is golden brown on the outside a cooked through (to an internal temperature of 160 degrees F), about 1 hour. Allow to sit for 10 minutes, or at least until cool enough to carve.