our life | meal planning

I've been meal planning for months now- looking at pinterest to decide what looks good for the next two weeks then buying supplies to make those specific meals and making sure we stick to it. 

We got these nice notepads a few months ago and they improved my meal planning game even more. i write out what we're going to eat for dinner and take into consideration when we'll be at the church, out of town, etc. to avoid a wasted meal. This has helped us to eat at home the majority of the time which in turn, has saved us tons of money. We moved some of our fast food budget over to groceries for this purpose. 

This round of meal planning I wanted to start eating healthier than we had been (postpartum problems..). we also have labor day plans, so I left a few days blank. 

I do have a "science" to my meal planning and take a few things into consideration: 1) separate types of meat I try to avoid eating beef or chicken or whatever two days in a row 2) separate types of food again, i try to avoid eating mexican/asian/italian inspired meals back to back just to keep from boring ourselves. if you notice on this plan, we have spaghetti squash pad thai one week and fried rice the next. 3) cluster unfreezing/opening food supplies i just mentioned not eating chicken two nights in a row, but i do take into consideration that if i thaw out a whole package of frozen chicken that i need to use it soon. I'm able to get two meals out of 1 package, so for week 1 I cooked chicken for Sunday's meal (chicken strips, broccoli, rice) and chicken salad (for lunch). I also did the same with mushrooms, I opened 1 package of mushrooms that I shared between egg muffins and the pad thai. this prevented letting an open container go bad. 

I try to change up what we eat every few weeks also just to avoid the boredom!

So that's how we meal plan!