6 // My 5-step meal planning framework revealed!
My 5-step meal planning framework revealed!
Figure out how to CUT BACK on food waste, time lost, and meals that never get made
Ashley's strategy for meal planning has changed again, and again, and again over the years. What worked for her as a dietitian mom of one, two, and later three kids has continued to evolve and adapt to the areas of highest importance in her life. And while yes, the nutrition of this meal plan is important and part of the reason she meal plans to begin with, Ashley knows the need for a sustainable system to getting easy dinner ideas executed night after night.
So join Ashley in an episode where she introduces the five pillars for meal planning. Even amidst all of the systems she has used and shared over the years, they all come back to these five pillars. Applying these to your life, you will find how to come up with a practical plan that fits your unique family. Ashley also gives a little dose of dietitian mom advice for how to pivot when life happens and plans change. Hint: it doesn't have to derail all of your dinner ideas!
Listen to this episode of The Veggies & Virtue Podcast now!
Full Episode Transcription
Please note this a raw transcription. If something doesn’t read correctly, toggle to that timestamp in the show so that you can listen in on what was actually being said!
[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to dive in today to a topic that many of you know, I really enjoy. And yet I know it is something that based on polls, I've done on my Instagram, about half of you, absolutely lows. And that is meal planning. I am not bringing this up today to tell you what I do and to tell you that you should do it too.
[00:00:22] What I'm here today to share with you. Is my five pillars to meal planning. When I first started using these five pillars and having them create kind of my framework for meal planning, I was in a very different life stage. I had different number of kids than I did now. Our life look completely different.
[00:00:40] And yet the pillars of meal planning I used then are still the same pillars I use now, even though the meal plan and the manner in which I go about. Is completely different.
[00:00:53] Hey mama, I'm Ashley, and welcome to the veggies. And for two podcast in this podcast, you will find simple menu ideas, kitchen, organizational systems, spelled out for mom life and feeding tips and tricks that are both evidence-based and great. I believe that you can find flexibility when it comes to feeding your family so that you can feel calm, capable, and connected in the kitchen as a registered dietician and Christian mom of three myself, and want you to break free from the mealtime battles and to feel equipped while feeding your kids all day long, pull up a stool at my kitchen counter.
[00:01:22] And let me pour you a cup of coffee and say a quick prayer for you. It's time to chat about the mealtime messes moments, administry ministry of motherhood.
[00:01:32] So the reason I want to walk you all through this today is because. No matter what life stage or season you find yourself in. I want you to see how meal planning, not only can, but ultimately needs to pay. To whatever is going on in your life. Otherwise it's ultimately a waste of time, a waste of energy and a waste of whatever food you bought for meals that were never made.
[00:01:56] And so what I want you to see is how this framework can be one that is adaptable for whatever's going on in life and ultimately. Can be changed week to week, month to month, season to season, however your life is going so that you're setting up more realistic expectations and how the meals you're coming up with as part of your meal plan, you're adding in that variety.
[00:02:20] You're getting the nutrition, your family needs. But you're doing it in a way that's efficient and effective to save you time and energy and food waste on the other side, right? You're not just spending this time to sit down and meal plan, just to say that you did it, you're doing it. So that meals are less stressful because the time of preparing specifically, we're going to talk mainly about dinner here, but this really can apply to any meal, but that time of day is a hard time of day and you just don't have the time, the energy or the food to be wasted.
[00:02:50] When it's dinner time. So what I want to show you is how to use these five colors to set up really realistic expectations for what will work for your family, with meal planning, so that you can begin to cultivate the habit of meal planning in a way that's creating more margin, lessening your stress, and ultimately helping you feed with a little bit more.
[00:03:11] So when I started planning for today's episode, something that I found really interesting in thinking through kind of how I wanted to outline this and what framework I wanted to share with you guys for kind of meal planning. 1 0 1 is that this framework and these five pillars are the same ones I use now, five years ago, when you know, I had an infant at home, a toddler, my husband was working late.
[00:03:37] Life was just in a crazy place. And. Yeah, the way that I applied these pillars was completely different than how I do it now. And yet it's still provided the framework to work for me then just as it does work for me now, you should not be working for your meal plan. It is not your master. It is to help you achieve your goals.
[00:04:03] Easier make meals simpler and streamlined some of these jobs and that as a mom, you just have to do whether you do like meal planning or whether you don't. And so, even though, as you know, a mom of one, a mom of two, a mom of three, the emphasis on different pillars has shifted. And I do things differently.
[00:04:25] What I think you will see and how we walk through these pillars. Is that different seasons and stages are going to prioritize different pillars, but it's important to. I have the whole picture on how these all work together to support you so that you can be more successful and have less stress when it comes to getting food on the table for your family.
[00:04:50] So, because there's a lot of content to dive into and I want to make sure to give you as much value as possible. We are going to dive in starting with pillar. Number one, the first pillar for meal planning is. And that is not coming up with your meal plan and like specifying all the recipes you want to make for the week.
[00:05:08] Nope, Nope. Nope. You were getting ahead of yourself. What I want you to do is look at what the plan for the week is. Take out a pencil and your planner and consider it. What your family even has going on this week? What nights do you need meals for on the nights that you are planning to cook? Do you have time to cook a meal?
[00:05:29] Do you only have time to maybe like an assemble, a kind of ready-made meal? Do you need to order out, do you need this to be something prepped ahead? Do you even have time to preheat an oven? These are very important things you need to look at. What is that segment of time? That you have to work with so that, you know, what is the plan that you're even working with and that you can tailor this meal plan that we're going to holistically get into through these five pillars.
[00:05:56] And you know that you've considered your calendar first. So pillar one is to plan, but when you're doing that, the first thing you need to consider is your calendar and look at it to see, do your kids have sporting events? Do they have a practice or a game? Who's going to be home with the kids. Who's going to be cooking.
[00:06:14] If you and your husband have different cooking capacities, you know, who, what kind of meal is most appropriate for that night? Is it something that you need to get out the door early for, or you'll be home late from all these things are very important for setting you up for success. And they lead into the second consideration, which is.
[00:06:32] Something. I alluded to being, what kind of meals do you need? If you know that, you know, Monday night you need something that is super quick. You may either pick a meal that's ready to assemble and you know, maybe it's sandwiches for dinner or case studies or something super easy. It may be something that you prepped ahead on the weekend.
[00:06:51] We can get into what those meals actually are in a little bit, but you need to factor in based on your calendar. How do you need to plan convenience accordingly so that it fits your family's schedule for the week. Once you've considered your calendar and you've considered the degree of convenience you need on each given night, you can then consider how much kitchen time do you have and be realistic about.
[00:07:16] Not only how much kitchen time do you have to give, how much kitchen time do you want to give? I hear from a lot of families, particularly working families that if they're just getting home from work and picking their kid up from daycare, their kid. Craves them and needs them. And that connection is not necessarily happening at the table because if a meltdowns happening before the table on the meal, doesn't get there things since spiral really quickly.
[00:07:41] So you may know that you are in a season where you have very little time to spend in the kitchen because you're committing that time. To your kid, rather than on cooking a meal for your kid. And that is totally okay. We have to honor the season we're in and just forego comparing ourselves or our families or our seasons to anyone else's.
[00:08:01] And we need to look at what is the plan that works for our family in this season, so that we can consider our calendar. We can consider. The degree of convenience we have, and we can consider the amount of kitchen time that we're able or willing to give and how that shapes the food that we're going to come up with moving forward and pillar.
[00:08:23] Number two, before we move on to pillar, number two, I want to make sure that your. Penciling in your plant. This is not penciling in your meal plan. Although it might be the same place for some of us. If you're like me, you love a good paper planner. You may have a paper meal plan. You may do your weekly calendar on your phone.
[00:08:44] You may have it on your desktop, on a whiteboard wherever you might have it. I want you to make sure that you have written down somewhere. What the plan is for the week. This probably goes without saying, because we all need to know what's on the calendar for. Regardless of whether or not we're meal planning.
[00:09:00] However, I also want this to be something that you can easily reference as you were making your meal plan. So wherever you have your plans for the week, I want you to make sure it is accessible to you when you were making your meal plan so that you can be referencing it to make sure that your meal planning accordingly for whatever your family plan.
[00:09:21] For the week. So if you already have a system that works for you, whether it be paper planner on your phone, whiteboard, in the kitchen, whatever that might be. That's awesome. If you don't, I encourage you to check out my meal planner with Amy, from beacon health design, we made a paper tear off pad that you can make a new meal plan every week on.
[00:09:42] But what I love about it is at the beginning, it gives you a chance to kind of brain dump your week at a glance because what I don't want. As you perpetuating more mental fatigue when it comes to meals, because you're trying to keep what's going on for your family during the week and what meals fit with that plan in your head.
[00:10:00] We all have enough to think about, put some things on paper, get it out of your brain space. So it's very obviously there and you don't have to think about it more than as necessary if you think about it as the first pillar being playing. Being kind of the win role of your job, you know, you're figuring out when dinner is going to happen.
[00:10:22] And again, I'm just sticking to dinner here, but meal planning can obviously apply to any meal, but if you're thinking, okay, when are we doing dinner tonight? How much time do we even have from kind of the moment. Preparations to the minute we finish and get up from the table and clear the table. And that's kind of your job of when the meal is going to be offered.
[00:10:42] I want you to think of the next two pillars as being what, again, going back to the division of responsibility from a previous episode. Your job as the parent is what, when and where food is offered. And so with this next pillar, being the pillar of pick your job is to pick what is going to be offered.
[00:11:01] And most often this starts with kind of the main course, and there's a few different strategies you can use in order to pick what you want, kind of the main concept of the meal to be or cuisine or. But I want to share a few ideas with you in case this isn't something that you're already doing, and that might be things like cuisine categories.
[00:11:20] So you're maybe thinking, you know, some common ones that you might have heard before would be like a meatless Monday or a taco Tuesday. You know, you're kind of getting into Mondays, we're going to serve something meatless, whether that's completely meatless or that's, you know, more of a seafood based meal.
[00:11:35] However you want to take it. Maybe that's a category that you're going to follow. Tuesday, you're doing tacos or some rendition of. Personally, there was a season that I really stuck to that, and that really helped me not have to think about on Monday what I was making, because I knew I was making something meatless on Monday.
[00:11:52] For me personally, at the stage I'm at, I don't personally like to tie a day to what we're having. So we have tacos every week, but it is not always on Tuesdays, but I want you to think about how coming up with cuisine categories can just kind of start to bucket your brainstorm. So you kind of think of what are the, what are the cuisines are the buckets that our family enjoys the most.
[00:12:12] And then it becomes a little bit easier to categorize and compartmentalize. So moving into kind of the next part of what is being offered, we're going to move on to pillar number three, and that's pairing, and this, I want you to think about less of being like the main course and more of what you're pairing with.
[00:12:30] That means. As sides. And so again, in alignment with your role in the division of responsibility, you're choosing, you're picking what you pair with the meal for the night. And so if you you know, are having something that's meatless Monday and you know, that. Whatever that main courses is maybe not a food that your child particularly prefers.
[00:12:57] I don't want you to feel stuck that a meatless Monday is not something my kid likes. No, no, no, no, no. We need to take a step back and you need to be really focusing on this pillar of how are you preparing your meals? So that you can prepare one meal for the whole family in order to meal plan effectively and efficiently, you have to think of how am I making this meal work for the whole family so that you're not coming to dinner time making this meatless Monday meal, knowing that your kids aren't going to eat it, knowing that you're going to have to make something else for them.
[00:13:27] No, no, no, no, no. That's not what we're doing. What we are doing is. Picking, and then pairing sides with that meal that we know will help provide our kid with something that they enjoy and most often will eat. And if you're not familiar with it, this is what I call my love. It, like it learning it framework.
[00:13:48] And I'm just going to plant a seed for it in this episode, because we'll dive into it in a deeper dive in a future episode. But ultimately when you're thinking of how you're pairing this meal and the meal plan, I want you to think about it in terms of. Is there something being provided that your child loves something that they typically will eat kind of a food that is preferential to probably other ones chances are, if you're worried about this, there's plenty of foods that they're still learning to.
[00:14:15] Like, and that is okay. We want you to exposing them to those suits. The middle ground foods would be those that they may or may not eat. You may have seen them eat it before, but it's not necessarily something they really get excited about or pre. Those are going to be your like-it foods. So when you're structuring this meal plan, and you're thinking of what items you may want to pair with the main course, look for those gaps.
[00:14:36] Is there something that your child likes, prefers and tends to eat? And that gives you the peace of mind as the parent, you are offering something that they tend to enjoy a preferred food. So then you can have peace of mind over all the learning at foods that you're also offering as part of. And if you visited my website, you know that I have a free grocery list that you're welcome to just come and download and use as a reference.
[00:14:59] But when we get into this fourth pillar of purchasing, I want you to consider, do you have a streamlined way of purchasing what you need in order to pull off your meal plan? This might be something like my free grocery download. It might be like the grocery list tear off that I made with Amy that you guys can order and just.
[00:15:19] You know, in your kitchen and just go through and highlight because it already has over a hundred different ingredients and items. That'll either kind of help you think of new items. Say you're just putting veggie as one of the pairings and is one of the sides for your meal plan. But then you look under veggies and you see, oh my goodness, there's all these different options I could choose.
[00:15:39] That again is reducing the mental fatigue because it's already spelled out for you. So that fifth, or excuse me, the fourth pillar is to purchase. And I'll admit sometimes the pillars are not in sequential order because there have been seasons where I have really had to start with pairing. When my kids have been at a pickier season, there have been seasons where I've started with the plan, and I know things are insane right now.
[00:16:02] And I just need to make sure that we can make this plan work for our. There are seasons where just taking the mental fatigue out of deciding and sticking to pick was easiest. And there are definitely weeks. This is not normally my strategy overall, but there are definitely weeks where I have not had a chance to plan or to pick or to pair.
[00:16:21] But I'm in enough of a habit for meal planning that I know I can go to the store and I can purchase an assortment of things and I can work backwards from whatever I've purchased from whatever was on my grocery list to come up with a meal plan, that'll work for our family and the fifth and final pillar.
[00:16:38] Is prep. And this is where again, things have shifted over time. I have had a hashtag Vivi meal plan challenge on Instagram for years, where I used to do a tremendous amount of meals. On the weekends, when both of my kids would nap and I had kind of some margin to prep meals ahead that is not conducive with our life.
[00:16:59] Now that we have two of my three kids who don't nap anymore. And we choose to spend that time on weekends differently. But now I'm doing something like my DIY dinner bins, where I'm just gathering the ingredients and some of the time it is that I'm gathering those mosquitoes first. I'm just putting all the stuff I need.
[00:17:14] No, we need to eat up in a bin and figuring out kind of how does this plus this. Something edible that will actually enjoy and then pairing random things with it. But that's what works for me in this season. But I want you to think about what prep works for you. If you know, from looking at your calendar and the need for convenience you have, and the amount of kitchen time that you have, that you need to prep some things ahead and not be every meal, but you, maybe you just need to do.
[00:17:39] You know, cut veggies in advance. You may need to make one meal and stick it in the Crock-Pot in advance. So you can just turn it on the morning of, but you have to factor this in so that you can be setting yourself up for success. If there are shortcuts you need to make, again, this might be a shortcut that you're doing.
[00:17:56] You may be prepping certain things. Or you might just be giving yourself that permission to be buying items that are already prepped ahead, like prep, veggies, or pre-made sauces or meat that's already in the marinade, whatever that might be as part of your meal plan, you need to think about what kind of prep and either I going to do.
[00:18:16] Or do I need to account for that? I'm going to buy something that helps me just like eliminate that added work on my plate. So I know that this was a lot of information being thrown at you with these five pillars. But what I want you to do is to take them and start honing in on which ones have you been doing?
[00:18:33] Which ones haven't you been doing? What is working for you? What isn't working for you, and to start working through these five pillars and look and see for the season that you're in. Where do you need to be focusing a little bit more or what, which of these five pillars have you not been practicing? And it's been kind of one of the missing links to your meal plan.
[00:18:55] Also, I want you to check out the meal planning, tear off sheet that I have with beacon hill designs. That's linked on my website and I'll link it in the show notes as well as the grocery. Because if nothing else, if you're just starting on number four and you keep the grocery list in your car, and you're starting with pillar, number four of purchasing, and you're just going through and highlighting random things that will automatically start to help provoke new ideas in you, when you think of all the different things that you could purchase, I don't want to be promoting over purchasing.
[00:19:27] That's not where I would typically start, but I think if you just kind of feel stuck, you'll see how having tools like this meal planner and the grocery list that's already written out and you can just kind of self select items that are already on the list will at least help you get started with this.
[00:19:46] And real quick, before we hop off, I'm going to say a quick grace, dear Jesus. Thank you for this time together. Thank you that, you know, as much as we may crave and seek routine, sometimes that life does not always go as planned and that we have to pivot and adapt and that you equip us for each of the things that we face in the days as moms and with our families.
[00:20:06] And God, I pray that you equip these moms with a system for meal planning that will help streamline their family meals so that they can focus on. Whatever is most important in the season that they're in. We pray that you be with them. And the day ahead in Jesus' name, amen.
[00:20:24] It has been a joy having you on podcast today. And if you've enjoyed it as well, I have a quick favor to ask. Do you mind hopping over to apple podcast and leaving me a written word? This will only take you a hot second, but it truly blesses me every time I get to read one of you right over there. And it allows me to bless others through this podcast and the episodes to come.
[00:20:44] The other thing that you can do is to take a screenshot of this episode and tag me over on Instagram at veggies in virtue, I would love to see what action steps that you're taking from this episode, and also to support your family in the journey moving forward until next time. Thanks for coming over to chat at my kitchen.
[00:21:00] Remember that you will always have a seat and a snack waiting for you here.
