Episode 10: Say Goodbye to Last-Minute Dinner Stress
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
Everyone dreads the question, "What should we have for dinner?". After a long day, the last thing you want to do is make another decision, especially one about what to eat. So, if you want to get out of the nightly scramble to figure out what to have for dinner, you'll need a meal plan. In this episode, Katelyn teaches you a super simple way to think about and create your own meal planning routine that will free up stress, relieve some of your mental load, and make evenings easier. Whether you’re new to meal planning or looking for ways to improve what you already do, this episode is sure to give you some fresh ideas and super simple actionable steps.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
01:18 The what-to-have-for-dinner dilemma
02:37 The basics of meal planning
07:06 Creating your family's go-to meal menu
11:24 Implementing your meal planning process
15:11 Advanced meal planning tips
19:47 Ways to get support
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
-
You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I am feeling a little fiery and ready to just jump in to the topic for the episode today. It is late afternoon here, which means in not too long. I'll be heading downstairs. I work on the third floor of our home, so I'll be making the trip down to the first floor to start cooking dinner.
I don't know what your weeknights look like, but when we are in soccer season, all three of my children play soccer right now. When we are in soccer season, there is a very, very short window of time for me, for us, Whoever's cooking to get some sort of dinner in front of the kids in front of our family before we have to Head out the door get on cleats and socks and all of those things.
Maybe you've got a really Little one who has an early bedtime and your window is also very small between when you get home from work and pick up and have to eat. And so we're going to talk about what to have for dinner. That question that maybe you're cringing or twitching a little bit as I say it here, what should we have for dinner? Nobody wants to make that decision at the end of the day. Okay. At the end of a workday, nobody wants to decide what should we have for dinner. But if you or someone in your house is asking that question, what should we have for dinner? It tells me that you haven't already decided.
You don't already know. You didn't make the decision in advance. Now, some of you might feel a little allergic to the idea of meal planning. Maybe somewhere along the line you saw a blog post, or a Pinterest pin, or a reel, or something on Instagram or TikTok of someone who just Overcomplicated, the whole process, who walked you through their meal planning and meal prepping routine and you felt overwhelmed just watching it, just reading about it.
Maybe they have binders and themes and this whole process of checking ingredients and blah, blah, blah. But at its core, meal planning is simply making the decision in advance. Making the decision in advance about what you're going to eat on a given day, on a given night.
And so whether you are sitting there feeling resistant to the idea of meal planning because it seems like too much, or maybe you love your meal plan. spontaneity, you don't know what you're going to feel like eating. That's a really common thing that I hear. I don't know what I'm going to feel like eating on any given night.
How can I decide in advance? So whether that's you or whether you are someone who maybe is fairly consistent with choosing meals, I know you're going to get something out of this episode. Either I'm going to convince you to make it really simple and to make some of those decisions in advance, or you're going to hear maybe a new tip or an idea to make what you're already doing more efficient.
Either way, it's a win. And I will say that whether it is in my planning intensive, my 90 minute strategy sessions where we come in and troubleshoot one, two, or three areas of work or life that feel stuck for you, or whether it's with my one on one clients, meal planning is something we're all striving for because the alternative is you're left at the end of the day.
You can picture it. You get home from work. You've done the daycare pickup or the school pickup or the aftercare pickup and you have very minimal reserves left in the decision bank. You have decision fatigue. You woke up in the morning, decided what to wear, what to pack for the kids for their lunch. You decided how to get that deadline met, what projects to prioritize, how to spend your time, who to respond to today versus tomorrow.
You've made So many decisions throughout the day. There is so very little left in the tank. And when you haven't made the decision in advance,, you default into whatever is easiest, whatever is in front of you. Now I am not opposed to getting takeout or grabbing a freezer meal from the freezer. There are nights when you need to phone it in, as they say. You need to pour cereal for dinner. You need to make mac and cheese from the box.
That's okay. There's no shame. There's no guilt there. But what I hear from clients who come to me wanting more of a meal planning process in their lives, it's because they want to eat out a little bit less or get less takeout. They want to spend a little less money. They want to cook. They actually do want to cook or have a home cooked meal at least a couple times a week.
Or maybe they want to eat out because the season of life that they're in requires that, but they want that to be their choice. And not just what they do because they ran out of time and energy. So what I want to do today is take you through some very simple steps, simple things you can put in place to start to build this routine, this habit of deciding in advance what you're going to eat so that you don't save that decision until it absolutely has to be made.
You can think intentionally and objectively, I'm going to suggest that you do this process that you make these decisions earlier in the day when your reserve tank is full, but you'll be able to think intentionally and objectively about what you want to have on any given night. You'll be able to use what you already have, so you're not buying more.
You'll be able to accommodate some requests, maybe from your kids. You'll be able to accommodate your schedule, and you'll be able to feel better about getting DoorDash or Takeout, because that, again, was your choice. So the place that I always start when I'm coaching someone on meal planning,
my first question is always, what are your family's go to meals? Right now, can you rattle off for me 10, 12, maybe 15 meals that you know you could make and most, most, everyone in your family will eat? Meals that aren't long, drawn out, complicated, intricate recipes. But just the things that you know you can make and that people will eat.
I'm guessing you have at least a handful of these that you could tell me without too much thought. I did this just the other week with a client and I counted because I wanted to check myself. Is this really true? Would I believe that anyone could rattle off at least a handful? And we went through and she was able to do seven.
Seven. And one of those was mac and cheese with peas. Her boys love that and she feels good about adding the peas in. That's great. My kids would eat around the peas. Oh my gosh, I, my husband showed me this, this post from Instagram
it was like, how can this person, who puts their shirt on backwards, can't put their shoes on the right feet, yet they can spot a diced onion from a mile away, and I thought of my youngest, who will find the littlest piece of onion in anything that I make and scrape it out off to the side.
Ew, I don't like those. Anyway, all right, I digress. Back to getting that list of five or seven or ten of your go to meals. So I'm going to give you some ideas. Your go to meal, as I said, that client, mac and cheese with peas. It could be breakfast for dinner. We love to do pancakes, sausage, and eggs. Maybe pizza is a go to meal.
Either you make it, it's frozen, you get it from takeout on Friday nights. Trader Joe's, I love their frozen orange chicken. That's a go to meal. Grilled cheese. Grilled chicken with a salad.
They can also be recipes. Just the other night I made, this chicken dish with carrots and shallot and butter and white wine and it's delicious, it's not super intricate, that's a go to meal for my family. And yes, it follows a recipe, unlike breakfast for dinner where I don't need anyone to tell me how to make pancakes and eggs and sausage.
But that list that you rattled off or started to compile, I want you to write it down. I'll Or when you get back to your computer, when you're not driving, if you're driving, add it to the Notes app on your phone. Put it into a digital notebook, a Google Doc, a Google Sheet. What you're creating with this list is a menu.
So just like when you go to decide what you're going to do today. You're choosing from that running list of options. Listen to episode one on the power of a simple to do list. You're choosing from a list of options.
You can think of it as a menu of what your family kitchen offers. So when you look at the week ahead. You're not pulling from all of the places. You're not going to Pinterest, or to maybe a reel that you've saved on Instagram, or that link that someone texted to you or sent you in an email, or one of the, you know, however many browser tabs that you have open on your phone.
You're going to a central hub, an index, an inventory, use whatever word you like. It's a central menu. Now, another thing that I love to encourage clients to try when you are creating this menu, this list of go to meals that your family knows, likes, loves, create a section underneath that of recipes that you want to try so that when you do come across an interesting recipe, when someone does send you a link and says, you know, my girlfriends will sometimes send out a group text, oh my gosh, we tried this recipe and the kids loved it, thought I would share.
Grab that link and you have a place to put it.
Once you have this menu, this inventory, meal planning then is as simple as finding a few minutes. You can sit down, you can stand up, but you just look at your calendar, look at your list of options, and choose. What do we want to have for dinner this week? Maybe you choose going into the week that you want to have two nights of takeout.
Maybe you've got extracurriculars, you have an evening meeting, maybe there's Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts, a work event where you're going to be late, or one of you is going to be solo parenting. And so two nights of takeout makes sense. You go into dinner time. knowing that you're going to order takeout and that you need to do that in advance because maybe those places will be busy or it just takes time to place the order and get the order or have it delivered or whatever that looks like.
Having a meal plan doesn't mean that you're going to cook every meal from scratch. And when we think about that section that I talked about of where you might put recipes that you someday want to try, your goal should be to increase and lengthen the list of your go to meals. You want to add to it over time, so maybe there is more variety.
If you started with just five or seven, I can already hear some of you thinking, well that'll get real old, that'll get repetitive if we're just having the same five meals week after week after week. True. So the goal should be to lengthen it, to add to it. So when you have that section of recipes to try, things that look interesting or that you think you might want to see if the kids like it or not, you could choose a night of the week where maybe you don't have a lot of things scheduled, where you have the space to try something new.
Because when you try a new recipe, well, maybe it's not the same for you as it is for me, but I'm pretty slow at a new recipe. I'm reading something new. I'm orienting myself to how that, cookbook or author, that chef has written the recipe. I'm learning, I'm figuring it out. And so for our family, for example, Sundays are typically the day when we will try something new, or we will only choose the recipes that maybe already know we like them, but they are just lengthier, they take more time, they're more labor intensive.
So Sundays are that experimental slash longer recipe day for our family. I have another client who in the middle of the week is one of the nights when both she and her husband are home. He often works evenings. And so for the middle of the week, that's when she would rather have that flexibility to try out something new.
And the goal is you're trying something new so you can decide and know, is this something that we could add to our regular rotation. Or do we ditch it and move on to the next recipe next week to try and see if that one is one we can add to our regular rotation. So at its simplest, that's meal planning.
It's looking at your calendar, looking at your go to list, and then deciding. Now there are, of course, lots of nuances and variations within that, but at its core, it's really quite simple. It's really quite simple
and it has such a huge impact on how we feel in the evenings. The mental load that it relieves knowing that tonight when I go downstairs we're having pasta and meatballs, done. There's no decision that I have to make. I just have to execute on that. Now clients often ask me, well, how often, how frequently should I be planning?
Do I do it once every week? Do I do it once every two weeks? Do I do it once a month? And you might need to experiment a bit to see what works best for you. In 2022, I looked back, I had to look this up. I knew I did it for a whole year, but I couldn't remember when. In 2022
I planned for the whole month at a time. Now I shopped each week. I went to the grocery each week, but I made my decisions once a month. or just 12 times a year. In that season of life, I did not enjoy the process of deciding what to eat and seeing it on a whole month really helped me see that we weren't just repeating week after week.
There was variety. And so I did that for a whole year and that worked really well. This season of my life, I've got this pattern down. I'm actually really quite quick at planning and deciding our meals. So I plan on a weekly basis. our schedules are a little bit more variable. It doesn't take much for me to sit down and choose.
And so I do that on the weekend. I choose our meals one day, make the list, and I go shopping the next day. And I've got it all prepped for the week ahead. Another question that I get asked a lot is when should I do this? And I think it doesn't really matter. Again, if you find yourself asking a lot of those questions, you have to start wondering if you're just avoiding actually taking action.
It doesn't really matter. Think more about when you want to go to the store or when you want to have your groceries delivered. When do you want to be stocked for all of these meals? And then if you need any prep time, back that up. And then if there's a certain time of the day or day of the week that feels easiest, then you just know that you have to have your decisions made before then.
So if you want to shop on Saturday mornings, for example, you need to have decided by Saturday morning what you're going to make so you can create the list of ingredients and place it and have it in time for the week ahead. I also have a standard list of all of our staples, so the things that I'm buying that aren't part of a specific meal or recipe but milk, almond milk, yogurt, eggs, bread, the snacks that the kids like or things that we pack in lunches, those I copy and paste week over week, assuming that we need those.
Once you have this foundation in place. You've got your meal inventory, you've got your calendar, you're making those decisions based on your schedule and getting the food, the ingredients that you need in time. You can experiment and play from there. I have clients that do meal themes throughout the week to, again, make the decision process easier.
They're not choosing from all of their recipes or potential meals. They're only choosing from their Italian recipes, or their pasta, or their chicken recipes, or their rice dishes, or their soups. You can play a little bit more, and have fun. But at the end of the day, meal planning is simply about making the decisions in advance.
It's giving your future self that gift of not having to decide.
The evenings are busy enough. They are so full. There are so many things that we feel like we need and want to do after the work day, the school day, the daycare day, to be with our kids, to tidy up the home, to get everybody fed, bathed, into bed. There is so much.
Deciding what to have for dinner, answering the question what should we have for dinner, does not deserve to take up any space in your evenings. I want you to experience what it's like to come home or walk down to the kitchen in my case and just grab the pot, fill it with water, put it on the stove to boil.
Just start doing the thing without any hesitation. Without any question or debate with yourself or with others in your family about what we should eat. It's already been decided. Your past self gave you that gift. What a powerful gift.
If you would like some support, a fresh set of eyes on how you meal plan and even prep. For your dinners each week for getting to the store getting that list made Creating the list of go to meals for your family. I would love to support you And the 90 minute planning intensive that I offer is the perfect place to do that.
You can learn more about that session specifically on my website
at the mother nurture forward slash planning dash intensive. I would love to see you on my calendar in the coming weeks. So we can once and for all. Remove that pressure, remove that frustration and create some 📍 space for you in your evenings because meals are done. They're decided. It's not an issue. All right.
I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, please reach out. You can find all of the resources on my website, in the show notes at themothernurture. com forward slash podcast. And I will see you in the next episode. Take care. Talk soon.
If you enjoyed this episode, you won’t want to miss what’s coming next! Make sure you hit the subscribe button to tune into future episodes.
If you love the Life Coach for Working Moms Podcast, I’d be so grateful if you’d rate and review it on iTunes! Simply scroll down, tap to give it a five star rating, then tap “Write a Review.” Your rating and review will help more busy working moms discover helpful episodes each week!
