One of my new year's resolutions for 2008 is to get in the habit of pre planning my meals each week - not just for my personal nutrition, but to make it easier to feed my family (have fewer "I have nothing to make for dinner, let's go out tonight" moments).

How do you plan your meals for simplicity and variety? How do you factor in spontaneity?

Currently, I do plan on pre-packaging my meals into steam fresh bags and freezing them - meat, veggies and seasonings together. I'll just steam a bag for each person per meal that I am feeding. This seems simple enough with standard chicken and fish, even some beef.

Though I occasionally like to cook, doing big batch cooking is NOT something I want to get into - I get lost in details of big planning like that and actually have a pretty short attention span, which results in a job half done.

Have any of you used the Ziplock or other microwave steamer bags? What spice combinations have you found work really well?

God Bless,
mik

I don't have a family and kids to feed, so I dunno how this would go over... I think keeping the foods simple--single ingredients, except for seasonings--would help out a lot.

I do not own a microwave ad cant stand anything steamed so that would leave that option out for me...

I preplan all my meals -and have awhite board on my fridge to tell me what my meals will be...

I spend about 30 minutes on saturday am - compiling a sort of grocery list - of what I sort of wat to have during the week... Whe I'm at the store if somethig catches my eye or is on sale... I'll make adjustments in my notes..

I will package things together in the fridge, ad do a lot of veggie cut ups at the same time when I get home froom the grocery store ad store things in ziplock containers labelled...

I simply create spreadsheets with a bunch of meals planned out on them. Each meal is broken out by calories, protein, fats, carbs, etc.

At the beginning of each week I decide which meals I want to include.

In terms of spontaneity, if I want something, I eat it.

Do you have any examples of "these"(speadsheets)? Maybe specific breakdowns for common meals? Sorry if they are posted somewhere else and I just haven't stumbled on to them. Or if not, could you recommend a book that would contain example meals broken down as you described above?

My spreadsheets aren't on the forum. I just keep them internally. They look something like this:

As for books and sites, I answered your that in your other thread.

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My honey and I sit down every Sunday and plan out the weeks meals and exercise. We make a menu and typically have at least one night of "leftovers." From that we make a grocery list of all the things we need and then go from there.

Since I am pretty busy the meals are typically quick and easy. Like girlled chicken, baked potaotes, and a veggie, somthing that either of us could throw together easily. We typically save the more time consuming meals for the weekend. Also I have a crockpot which is great because you can just throw a small chicken or turkey in before you head out int he morning and have a whole week of meals from it...

I'll get one of the books or research online and compile my own spreadsheets. Keeping this info at the ready is a great way to save time and frustration! Thanks for the great idea. You can surely tell the effort and time that went into preparing them. On the plus side, I'll learn alot about nutrition while making "my" meal plans. I guess I just need things to be real easy, quick, and convienent, especially when doing it for the rest of my life. Again, thanks.

All great ideas...I like the crockpot one...easy. Thanks.

I pretty much do my planning at the store, but I more or less eat the same things every day (only on the weekends do I really alternate what I eat.)

I like what I eat and so I eat it alot.

google documents has a great spread sheet program which I started using to keep track of my calories and what I've eaten. Its free and you can access it from anywhere there is the internets.