I don’t love to cook and I have a very busy life, so I had to find a way to make meal planning less stressful and time-consuming.
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For a number of years now, I have been struggling with our meal times. It is one of those things that I don’t know if it has to do with the fact that I have been feeding a small army for 30 years, or that I just get tired of the same old thing all the time. I don’t know what it is, but in the past several years, we’re talking maybe even past decade, I have really struggled with our meals and planning those meals and figuring out what to serve every single day, day in and day out. So I knew I needed to come up with something new, a new way to do this, and a way that would be a no-brainer, something that I could put on repeat, put on autopilot, but not get bored with it at the same time, so that is what this podcast is all about. I’m going to share with you the method that has been working for us currently, and in a subsequent podcast episode, I’m going to talk about how I have added my children into that rotation. So, let’s get started. I’m so glad you’ve joined me here on the Raising Arrows podcast, and today is something that, as a large family mom and a homes mom, feeding the family is a huge part of my day, and so I have had to figure out over the years how to feed my family to give you an idea of who I’m feeding and the age that I’m feeding, I have three teenage boys, and I have an 11 year old and a nine year old daughter. Then there is my husband, our 25 year old daughter, and my mom, who are also in the household. Those are the three that come and go throughout the time, making it as seven to nine people that I’m feeding in the past. When I have looked at these blogs and watched these YouTube videos, I found myself rather disenchanted with the whole notion of a meal rotation that looked something like Taco Tuesday, pizza on Friday every single week, because I don’t like to repeat meals very much, and I also have such an evolving life, I never really know how many people I’m feeding, who I’m feeding, why there might be extra people in the home, that happens quite frequently, it might be that I am called away and have to be somewhere, so it’s just one of those things where my life is very fluid. I need my meal rotation to be very flexible as well, and I don’t want to get bored with it. I don’t want to eat the same things, I don’t want to feed my family the same things. I may eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch every single day, but I am not going to want to eat the same thing for dinner every day, and I don’t know why that is. That’s just some weird quirk of mine. I don’t know, but I don’t want to do it. So I would look at these meal rotations, and I would think I can’t stick to that, because they will drive me crazy. I don’t want to do that anymore. And so every single week I was sitting down and I was writing out what we were going to have for dinner. I stopped planning breakfast, lunch, and snacks years ago. It was too much. I simply have the same things available for breakfast and lunch, and then sometimes I’ll make some special snack, or the kids know that there are things that can be snacked on, and I do not make lunch and breakfast, that is up to them. I have things for sandwiches all the time, I have things for cheese chips and nachos all the time, I have breakfast oatmeal, sausage, eggs, toast. I have all those things on hand, and everybody sort of straggles into the kitchen before school and makes their own breakfast, and everybody straggles into the kitchen after school and makes their own lunch, and that is how it has been now for several years since I have had older kids. That is not something I could have done when the kids were all young. This has only been in the past couple of years.
So, like I said, my youngest is nine, and so I have a little different lifestyle than I once had, and I’m needing my meal rotation to evolve with that lifestyle, but. Would find myself every single week sitting down at the breakfast table with, you know, recipes or my laptop open, trying to figure out what I was going to feed the family every single week, and there were times when I would find I was out of the house during dinner time a couple of times a week, or I was out of the house, like, in that 4o’clock time frame, when I should be cooking dinner. I was not going to be home, and I was like, well, I can’t make some elaborate meal, it’s going to have to be like sandwiches. And I also, besides not wanting to cook the same thing over and over, I also do not like to serve my family sandwiches for supper, because that’s what I’m letting them have for lunch, and it felt so wrong. And looking at that, you know, from an objective perspective, I can say it is not wrong to feed your family sandwiches for supper. It is okay. I am not condemning anybody who feeds their family sandwiches for supper. For me, it felt like that wasn’t the good mom thing to do, and that is something I really need to get over, but beyond that point is that I did want to have a nice sit down meal for when my husband comes home from his work, he has a two hour commute every single day, I would like him to have a decent meal, because there are a lot of times he does not have a decent meal throughout the day, so I want him to have something besides sandwiches or some leftover something or other that he doesn’t really want, so I do try to have a nice meal for dinner, but it was becoming very difficult for me to figure out what to make every single day, and I was actually feeling very stressed every time I went to put together this meal plan. I was very stressed about it. I like to shop once a week. I don’t have a set day that I go shopping a lot of times. It’s just when I finally get done with the menu plan and the inventory of what we have in the pantry, that’s when I feel like, okay, my grocery list is ready, I can go now. So I don’t have a set day to shop, but I like to have, you know, Monday through Friday for sure figured out, and then sometimes Saturday and Sunday were just hard. I don’t know. It all felt hard, and I hate to admit that, because I have been married for 30 years. This summer it will be 30 years that I have been married. I have been feeding someone other than myself for almost 30 years. You would think I would be good at this, but I am not. Some of it’s because I don’t like to cook, particularly. Some of it is because the kitchen has always been the one place in my house that doesn’t ever seem to stay clean. Some of it is that I’m not a real foodie. I think a lot of that stems from the fact that I have done different diets over the years, and to be frank with you, food is a difficult topic for me, and so I get overwhelmed by it. I get overwhelmed by trying to feed everybody something healthy. I don’t want to feed them junk, and my definition of junk is probably completely different from a lot of people, and that also is a problem, because I get in these, I get in my head where it’s like I have to make sure that I’m feeding them, you know, this well-balanced diet, and not too many carbs, and not too much sugar, and not too much of this and that, and so I overthink it, and that’s really what it comes down to, is I’m overthinking pretty much everything, so I am definitely over thinking my meal plan, though.
So I would sit there at that table, and I would spend like the entire afternoon just trying to come up with five to six meals to have for dinner each week, and then the next week I was doing it again, and I finally broke. I was finally like, I can’t do this. This is utterly ridiculous to spend this amount of time doing this. I have to come up with some other way to plan. Now, over the years, I have tried to incorporate my children into cooking as well, and a lot of times, what that ended up looking like was, whatever I was cooking, I would call somebody in to help with that, like a sous chef, and it was just basically whoever I thought was available at the time. The funny thing is, almost always the same children are available, and the same children are never available, so it was a little bit lopsided, who was learning how to cook and who was not, and I really wanted to incorporate the children into the meal rotation, but I don’t want to talk about that in this podcast. We’re going to push that to the next podcast, how I actually incorporated them, but I want you to know. That this meal rotation I’m going to tell you about includes each of the children, the younger children, the younger five that are still there, so they are 911, 1315, 17. It includes all of them, but I had to come up with something that would work for me initially, and some of you might be wondering, like, why didn’t you just have your kids plan a meal, and then they cook it. That’s exactly what my mom said. She said, “Why don’t you just have a kid plan the meal, and then they cook it? If it’s their night to cook, that’s what they cook. Unfortunately, as the main grocery shopper, that was not working. I did try that, by the way, Mom. I tried it. It didn’t work, because I would have to be on them constantly. Figure out what it is you’re making, figure out what it is you’re making, and then inevitably a smaller child would think they were going to make this humongous meal that there was no way they could make on their own, and I’m the one who has to do the bulk majority of the work on a day that I really don’t have the time for that, so it was a colossal nightmare to try to do that, that was something we tried probably a couple years ago, and it wasn’t working. It didn’t work with my older kids planning it, it didn’t work with my younger kids planning it, it just didn’t work, and so I pretty much abandoned that plan pretty quickly. However, as I was thinking through what would work as a meal rotation, what would make it easy for me to plan was really what was the front and center focus. What can I do when I sit down at that breakfast table to plan out the meals? What can I do to make it simple, and I kept going back to that idea of you have this meal on Monday and this meal on Wednesday and pizza on Friday, and that kept rotating in my head, but I kept thinking, no, I can’t do that, I’ve got to do it differently, and that was when I decided that some sort of theme, some sort of way to make it where it was flexible within the parameters. So this is what I came up with, and I’m going to show you. I have it on an index card, because I also have a terrible memory, but it’s on an index card, and I have Monday down through Sunday. Now I know that was pretty quick, because I’m going to, I’m going to talk you through this. First Monday, I decided that was going to be a breakfast night, and I don’t want to share with you quite yet. You like who I placed on each of these days, because that’s the next podcast.
But Monday is breakfast, so some sort of breakfast – we’re talking pancakes, eggs, bacon, breakfast sandwiches, something out on the black stone that’s been grilled, that’s breakfassy, a breakfast casserole, waffles, truffles, even something that smacks of breakfast, that’s going to be Monday, Tuesday, I originally had something different in this slot, and realized pretty quickly that wasn’t working out, so right now it is Italian or Tex Mex, and that’s because on Thursday I’m doing the exact opposite, it’s Italian or Tex Mex based on what I had on Tuesday, Wednesday because of Awana and the different things that we have going on on Wednesdays, that is a sandwich night, and that is my youngest child. I will tell you who’s doing that. That’s my youngest child, that’s the child who needs more help than anybody else cooking it’s sandwiches, and that way I can say, listen, you have sandwiches, just get out the meat, get out the cheese, the bread, the mayonnaise, the mustard, the chips. There it is. And there’s my sandwich night. Now that Awana is finished, I am letting her do more elaborate sandwiches, because she was like, “I want to cook too, Mom, and it’s like, “Okay, we can do that. But there’s a reason it was sandwiches. It was easy, and it was something we could throw together because the girls had choir before Awana, and so I was trying to get them out of the door. We typically eat between six and seven, and choir was at 530 and they’d have to leave like at 520 so feeding them an hour to two hours earlier than everybody was used to, it needed to be sandwiches, and my husband was okay with that. He wasn’t even actually home by the time these kids were having sandwiches, so he ended up usually having leftovers or something along those lines. Okay. Then, on Friday and Saturday, these kind of go back and forth to kind of like the Tuesday Thursday situation. Friday and Saturday, it’s me and my 15 year old, and the reason for that is we are the two that do the most grilling in the house. He does a lot of smoking and Blackstone grilling. I do almost entirely Blackstone grilling. So we decided on Friday and Saturday, whoever was available the most on those. Days would be the one who cooked, so a lot of times Friday is going to be something grilled or something special. It’s also currently our special night. I will put a link down in the description to explain, you know, what special night is, but that’s basically the night that each of the kids rotates through planning a party food, and then we have a big family party night every single Friday. Sometimes we have to move it because we’re gone on Fridays, but for the most part, Friday is a good day for that, because they can stay up late and we do things as a family, and then somebody plans these party foods, so that goes on Friday night as well. So, like, if my son wants to do smoked dips, that’s going to go on a Friday with the party night food. Saturday, a lot of times, is going to be leftovers if we’re not grilling something on that day, so we’re eating through the refrigerator leftovers. And then Sunday, currently, and this is this is an evolving process right now. I will tell you that currently I am trying to have something on Sunday where I can invite people over and family can come, and we have something that’s pretty delicious, but not overly complicated, and something that I could actually do some of the work on Saturday because of church, and then coming back about 1230 I don’t want to have too much to do, but I have found that it’s pretty easy to throw some burgers on the Blackstone if I have a macaroni salad already made up. Another thing that is fairly easy is a baked potato bar, so we will do baked potatoes, like in a crock pot, or keep them in the oven throughout church time, and then we just pull all the fixings together. If my son has happened to smoke some pork, we are able to put the pork and do barbecue baked potatoes.
Some people call them super spuds, so that’s a really easy Sunday meal that can feed a crowd, or we will do like soup and bread. The bread I could already have done on Saturday. I could even pull together the entire soup if I wanted to, or I could throw it into the crock pot. So those are the three things that I’m trying to do for Sunday that makes the Sunday meal really nice, something that we can invite people to, but not something that’s over complicated for me. Okay, so recap here: Mondays breakfast, Tuesday Italian or Tex-Mex, Wednesdays sandwiches, Thursday Italian or Tex-Mex, Friday grill or something nice still, but more kind of along the lines of a party food, Saturday mostly leftovers, and that gives me time also to prep for Sunday, and Sunday is going to be either something we’ve put on the Blackstone baked potato bar or soup and bread, and see that was something I was able to do completely from memory. I didn’t even have to look at my cheat sheet here, because it has a rhythm and routine to it. It has a rotation to it, and yes, I know all these years people have been telling me you just need to have this on this day and this on that day, and okay, great. Except I needed it to make sense in my brain, I needed it to not be the same foods over and over and over I needed it to be able to be flexible and fluid and adjustable and adaptable and have different meals all the time, so it becomes more of a themed rotation than an actual like this is what we have on Mondays and this is what we have on Tuesdays and so on, and so forth, it made it work with my brain. That’s something that we tend to forget as homemakers and large family moms, is that we don’t all operate the same. Our brains don’t all work the same, and something that works for one person doesn’t work for everybody, and the way that your brain operates actually needs to dictate how you’re running your household, so for me, I didn’t like to do things over and over, and I don’t enjoy cooking. So one person’s idea for, oh well, if you could just prep everything ahead of time, okay, great, but tell me how I’m going to find the time for that. That’s not how my life is, and that’s not how my brain works, so I can’t do it that way, at least not right now, in this season, maybe on down the road. Absolutely, but things change, and people are different, and life adjusts and adapts and evolves, and we have to change with it. So, I would encourage you to give a meal rotation a try. It has taken the guesswork out of it for me. I can just, you know, see it in my mind’s eye. Here’s what each of these needs to be. I’m not scouring the internet trying to figure out, you know, what sounds good or what might work for me. It’s just as simple as. As plugging in, this is what we’re going to have on this particular themed day, and make it simple enough that your brain can remember very easily what the theme is, and then plug those things in. I have lots of podcasts and posts and all kinds of things about menu planning over the years, because, like I said, life changes, things change, you have to adjust. So, I’d encourage you to take a look at those and see if there’s anything in my past life that would benefit you from when I had a lot of little kids, when I was grocery shopping once a month, from when I was doing a 30 day meal rotation, where it was just, here’s 30 meals that we really, really like. You can also take a look at some of my videos on how we stock our pantry, and all of that, to give you ideas for how to make this work with the way that your brain works.
Take those things, tweak those things, and figure out what it is you need to do that makes the most sense for you. So, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Raising Arrows Podcast. We’ll be back next time with a podcast on how I’m including my children in this meal rotation, and this has been phenomenal. You do not want to miss it again. Thank you so much for being here. Bye bye.
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