Bullet Journal meets Meal Prep: This trick makes it a breeze to set up a meal plan for the whole week. We show you how it works.
Yes, we actually want to eat healthy, balanced, and varied food. But something always comes up, doesn't it? We don't have the ideas or the ingredients for a spontaneous cooking session, and then we end up with sandwiches or whatever we have in the house. The problem can be solved easily with good planning: Good meal planning (trendily called Meal Planning), helps you to plan ahead, shop, and cook healthy and versatile.
Meal Prep meets Bullet Journal: Smart Meal Planning
We discovered the idea of Meal Planning on Pinterest, where blogger Shelby of "Littlecoffeefox" shares her idea. She writes, "I know there are about a dozen recipes I could cook off the top of my head without a cookbook or video, but for the life of me I can never remember them. This leads me to cook the same handful of recipes over and over. As delicious as spaghetti is, I have to provide a little variety."
To do that, she came up with a clever system in what she calls her "meal planning masterpiece." She uses a notebook, colored Post-its, and various overview boards, for example, "Old favorites," "Something new" or similarly labeled. There are no limits to what you can do. For example, you could also write "Quick Dishes", "Special Occasions", "For Guests" and "With Friends". You might also want to make a board with recipes that you've gorged yourself on for the time being, but that you'd like to bring out again in six months.
Here's how: Colorful meal planning week by week
The colors of the sticky notes have a meaning, of course: each color stands for a certain type of recipe. Either for meat dishes, vegetarian dishes, salads, soups, and desserts, or for breakfast, lunch, baking, dinner, and dessert. Which system you want to use is up to you, of course.
Now it's time for the actual planning: Behind the overview pages, Shelby now creates classic weekly calendars on double pages along the lines of the Bullet Journal. Each day gets its own field. And when she plans her week, she takes the Post-its from the overview pages and simply sticks them in the corresponding field of the respective day. At the end of the week, the sticky notes are removed and put back in their respective places on the overview pages.
We would add one addition to Shelby's idea: On the right side of the double-page spread, we would write a shopping list for that week. Unfortunately, the post-its in Shelby's version only contain the name of the recipe. Here you could also add the recipe source to find the recipe faster. With the shopping list in your notebook, you can then do your weekly shopping - and be sure not to forget anything.
Back at home - if you like it - it's time for the classic Meal Prep.
Create a meal plan with the Master List of Meals
Another option for Meal Planning is Kim's "Master list of Meals", which she presents in her bog "Tinyrayofsunshine". Also based on the Bullet Journal, she also developed a quick and easy way to catalog all her recipes. And because she loves lists, she created a table in her Bullet Journal with five columns.
In the last column she wrote her master list with simple and quick favorite recipes and in the four columns before that only the letters B, L, D, and S. Each recipe was then assigned a small bullet point in the corresponding column. B stands for Breakfast, L stands for Lunch, D for Dinner, and S for Snack or Side.
Meal planning deluxe: turn bullet journal into a cookbook
If you want to take the idea a little further, you can create a complete notebook just for your recipes, divide it into three parts and write the Master list of Meals on the first pages. Further back, in the second third, there are pages for the individual recipe sections, on which the recipes are written with their respective ingredients.
In the third, you'll put together your meal plans and shopping lists for the weeks. If you prefer to separate these things and want to use the Meal Planning book for a long time, you can also transfer the meal plans and shopping lists to your normal bullet journal (alternatively to the classic shopping list) in the respective week and go shopping with it. So you have everything in view, well organized, and provides a lot of variety on your plate.
Meal plan for professionals: shop once a month
We discovered a third and final tip for smart meal planning from Joanie of Simple Living Mama. She was looking for a way to limit grocery shopping to just once a month. Like many others probably, Joanie just doesn't like to go shopping. It's no wonder: with several small children, it's just "the less often I have to go shopping, the better" for her.