Bored of meal planning? Make a meal planning board!

By Lisa Jones

It’s January! Most of us greet the New Year with all our good intentions and brilliant plans of how we are going to be new and improved versions of ourselves. Never one to pass up an opportunity to reinvent myself, I tend to take on this resolution thing with a blinding zeal. I avow to never overreact, swear or trip over things—in short, I declare to never again be myself. And it never works.

So this year, I am committing to not over-commit. I am taking on small, simple life projects that help me get closer to my goals of being a more peaceful and productive member of the planet.

Eating tasty, healthy and non-jetlagged meals is important to me. Having a stress-free dinner where I can relax and connect with my family is also important to me. To achieve those goals, the best thing for me to do is meal plan.

Meal planning saves:
•  money
•  trips to the store
•  the life of my poor neglected produce
•  the stress that hits at 5 p.m. when I realize there is still one more meal in the day
•  the annoyance of eating peanut butter on Wasa crackers for dinner because it’s all we have in the house

OK, I get it. I need to meal plan. But although I find food to be wonderful and interesting, planning out dinner for the whole week can feel like a drag. Here is my little DIY project that will hopefully invigorate my meal planning and cost me exactly zero dollars.

I used to have a system of scribbling the weekly dinner plan on a scrap of paper and I’d promptly lose it. Since that did not really work for me, I decided I needed some sort of list device to keep myself organized. I find white boards to be hideously fugly, so that was not going to be displayed in my kitchen.

Then I stumbled upon this ingenious idea—it’s a menu board made out of a regular old photo frame. I simply dug around in our basement until I found this old matless frame that I liked. I typed up and printed out a simple menu sheet that just listed the days of the week on the left side and stuck it in the frame. Like the giant dork I am, I was totally excited to find a font called “chalkduster”! Get it? It’s like a café chalkboard!

Voilà! I have a fun menu board that I can use with a dry erase marker, which wipes right off the glass for the next week of meals.

You can make this as pretty and fluffy as you like, if those kinds of things excite you. You can use scrapbook paper and vinyl cutout letters and go totally crafty crazy. For me, an appropriately titled font choice was exciting enough.

I find that I am able to sit down once a week and plan the meals out, according to what food we already have, what produce is in season and what we might be craving (i.e. I just watched “Eat, Pray, Love” and therefore I require mountains of pasta).

However, if you are still feeling totally stymied by what to cook, meal-planning websites like:

Dine Without Whine: http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com can help by sending you recipes and grocery lists ($6.95 per month fee.) They feature menu-planning tools like kid-approved and vegetarian menus.

The Six O’clock Scramble: https://thescramble.com is another site that I have heard good things about (subscription costs are $19.50 for three months, $29.50 for six months and $54.50 for a year). It sends a weekly dinner plan with recipes that take less than 30 minutes to prepare, using lots of fresh, seasonal foods. There is also an onsite recipe box so you don’t forget about that awesome dinner you had last Thursday.

With a renewed enthusiasm for healthy food and my menu board in place, I feel prepared to take on 2011, minus the late afternoon dinner panic. But I still think I’m likely to trip over things, while overreacting to it with a flurry of swear words.

Lisa is a writer and a yoga fanatic with a serious travel addiction. She and her husband moved to Charlottesville searching for a change of pace from life in Los Angeles. They relocated here for grad school and mistakenly assumed that other places in the world were just as good. After moving away and learning otherwise, they were thrilled to return to Charlottesville and have proudly claimed their townie status. Lisa explores all things simple and sustainable through her blog Simplifying the Simple Life.