This week, A and I spent some time dissecting the month (even though it wasn’t over yet) and deciding if the month of minimal meals accomplished what I had hoped it would.
My goals this month were:
- Simplify meal prepping
- Simplify my grocery list-making and shopping
- Streamline meal planning
- Increase appreciation (among us all) for the diversity and variety of food we have
- Maintain a minimized grocery budget
While I don’t think I accomplished all of these goals and the months posed some challenges, I would definitely undertake another minimal meals challenge. I am pretty confident that I will carry some aspects from my monthly planning regimen into future months (though realistically November and December tend to be topsy turvy overall).
The Pros
- Streamlined meal planning
This was probably the best part of the month.
I have long wanted to create a rhythm to meal planning by having designated “days of the week.” I essentially wanted to have a “Taco Tuesday” and “Spaghetti Saturdays” and so on.
However, I also tend to like trying new recipes and new ingredients and will shop deals rather than purchasing consistent products.
So this makes having a routine and consistent rhythm more challenging – especially because I also disdain food waste.
During the October Minimal Meals Month, I was able to come the closest to accomplishing this goal that I ever had.
The beginning of my week tends to be pretty flexible and fluid. Sometimes we are visiting family members, sometimes I need to work late, sometimes A is home for dinner because he is working from home while other times he needs to be able to pack dinner to go….
It’s chaos.
So I tend not to regiment meals at the beginning of the week but rather work with leftovers or some simple salads and such. We’re in soup season, so often there is just a quantity of soup in the fridge, for example.
However, Wednesdays-Saturdays tend to be a bit more disciplined or consistent. We eat at home the majority of the time and whether A is working from home or going into work, I plan meals that will work either way.
My “schedule” for Minimal Meals Month thus became:
- Spaghetti Wednesdays: I initially started off with a different meal on Wednesdays but quickly realized that Wednesdays are the most rushed because I work for the first half of the day, pick up my kids, do homeschool in the afternoon, and generally feel pinched for time when dinner rolls around
- “Bowl” Thursdays: whether burrito bowls or General Tso’s tofu and broccoli on top of rice, I planned to make some kind of rice-based bowl each Thursday
- Brinner Fridays: if you don’t do breakfast-for-dinner yet with your kids (or for yourself!) you have to try Brinner. There are lots of possibilities – pancakes, breakfast casseroles, egg sandwiches, tofu scrambles, even cereal (for special occasions in our house) – so you can have a system while still remaining flexible
- Soup Saturdays: whether we ate soup or not varied because we often ended up cleaning out leftovers on Saturday evenings, but I aimed to make soup most Saturdays. This helped the aforementioned beginning-of-the-week chaos since I almost always had surplus
I hope to continue this general framework for meal planning moving forward because it reduced how much thought I had to put into what to make each week.
- Increased appreciation
I felt like my kids were complaining a lot about food or asking for different options frequently prior to Minimals Meals Month. Simplifying the ingredients coming in overall really seemed to help. Fewer options, fewer choices, fewer complaints.
The Cons
Though not necessarily a “con” in my book, I don’t think this month helped me reduce my grocery budget, expedite meal prepping, or simplify the shopping process very much.
I struggled with the shopping process most because I like to capitalize on deals and was tempted by items like grapes and mandarin oranges that were on sale (but not on our list). The downfall to having a minimal shopping list (at least in this challenge) was missing those opportunities to purchase “treats” or food items that you less frequently buy because of price.
Minimizing the grocery budget is also much easier when I am just focusing on shelf-cooking (something I didn’t do so much this month). I could have reduced my spending more by using items in my pantry, but those items were not on the challenge list.
And when it comes to meal prep….I am just slow, I guess. I feel like it takes me a long time to meal prep when I try to do it! I am still working on that area.
In Conclusion…
I would definitely do this challenge again and will absolutely try to carry some elements from the month forward.
I’m looking at my recipe binder longingly, but having a staple menu framework each week simplifies things so much with my family in its current season of life.
We had our deviations from the challenge list (variations on “bread,” grapes and mandarins, green beans from the garden, and some pantry items that might have been pushing the allowance for “spices” and “condiments” a bit much), but we met the spirit of the challenge in my book!
Let me know if this is something you would ever undertake with your family!