Simplify meal planning: Create your signature menu

We’ve all been there – you get motivated to get your family to sit down together, eat more healthfully, reduce food waste, save money, and expose your kids to a wide variety of foods

You spend a couple of hours finding recipes, hunt down unfamiliar ingredients in the grocery store, bring it all home, attempt to cook. Maybe while your dogs are howling and the kids are either clawing at your legs or going slack-jawed in front of the TV…finally you triumphantly get it plated and on the table.

Then the whining starts.

“This is weeeeeird!” “Do we have to eat this?”

Oh, it’s just me?

The anecdote is simple: you need to automate your weekly meal planning. Develop a menu of tried-and-true foods that you enjoy and everyone knows how to prepare. Start with a meal framework, then discover flexibility within the plan to adjust as the seasons change, or you find a new version of a meal, or your schedule varies. I call this your family’s “signature menu”.

Having a signature menu is the single most important part of how I’ve simplified meal planning. The best part of having a signature menu is that it creates traditions for your family. Having a signature menu takes away the bandwidth needed to constantly find new recipes, shop for unfamiliar ingredients, keep up with changing tastes. (Does someone in your family randomly decide to become a raw vegan with an exception for ice cream sandwiches, but just for this week? Oh, just me?)

And here’s the best part – your signature menu increases the predictability of your meals together and increases the rhythm in your home life. One of my favorite authors, Kim John Payne, says that meaning hides in repetition, and increasing rhythm and ritual helps connect us by the things we do together as a family. Meal times are when we come together – they serve a potent mixture of attending to our biological needs while sharing community and enjoyment.

Increasing the rhythm of your home life is one of the most powerful ways of simplifying your children’s lives.

Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting

Here are four steps to get started on creating your family’s signature menu:

Start with staples. Make a list of the types of food your family likes and eats regularly. Leave some space between each. These are your staples that you know how to prepare, you know will be eaten, and don’t require a lot of brainpower. For example, they might be something like pasta, tacos, stir fry, and pizza. Don’t worry about breaking down into a protein, carbohydrate, and vegetable – we’ll add those in later. You may find that you automatically have an easy side dish in mind (we typically do roasted broccoli or salad with pasta), and if that’s the case, write those down too.

Now, add in specific meals. For each category, write 2-3 meals you know how to prepare. We eat a lot of pasta, but sometimes that’s spaghetti and meatballs, sometimes it’s shells with cheese, and sometimes that’s a lasagna that I’ve prepared the weekend before that just needs to be popped in the oven to reheat. We like “taco night”, but sometimes that takes the form of beans and rice with peppers and onions, or shredded rotisserie chicken in tortillas, or tostadas topped with refried beans, crumble cheese, and salsa.

Finally, draw a column to the right and estimate the prep time for each meal. Not what the recipe says – this is based on your experience, how YOU make it, whether you make meatballs from scratch or use frozen precooked, oven or microwave. This is a judgment free zone. (Note: Your preparation times may vary based on the chef. A lot. That’s a whole other blog post.)

It might look something like this:

Now you’re ready to put it on a calendar.

Plan one week. Pull out your calendar and plan one week. This may change weekly, or monthly, or with the season – but in general, you know which nights of the week you have more time. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays are particularly busy with after school activities, or you workout on Wednesday or have a date on Friday. Identify the nights you are crunched for time and put your easy meals here.

Fill the gaps. Reducing food waste has been a big goal of mine – so we leave two nights every week labeled “whatever”. This has actually become my favorite night! Whatever night is either leftovers, something quick and easy like eggs, cereal, or PBJs, or we get take out.

If it’s a random assortment of leftovers, we keep it fancy and call it a buffet. I am always astonished at how my kids respond to this…they think eating three day old spaghetti is a great adventure! So as long as us adults are willing to play along, it goes fine.

Find the rhythm. This is the best part – here’s where we go back to what Payne is talking about. We establish each day as a “type” of food night, so they rhythm is predictable and comfortable. In our house, Monday is pasta night. Tuesday is tacos, Wednesday is whatever, Thursday is Thai or Greek-inspired (two of our favorite cuisines), Friday is homemade pizza. The weekends are one more involved meal like a roast or a new recipe, and one more “whatever” night. There is variability within each type of meal, and sometimes we get wild and have tacos on Friday, but you get the idea – creating simple, rhythmic traditions about what type of food is available each day of the week.

Stay tuned – in the coming weeks I’ll dive in to how to upgrade your signature menu with healthy add-ins and manage grocery shopping once per week.

Have you created a signature menu? What are your go-to dishes?