Minimizing My Hatred of Meal Planning

I like to cook. Moreover, I’ve gotten pretty dang good at it. I love looking for and trying new recipes. Making food for people and enjoying it with them brings me so much happiness. Food is my actual love language; I don’t care that it’s not on the generally accepted list of options.

So when I say that meal planning is the worst, it’s not because food is a struggle for me.

It’s that every day I have to feed six people dinner. Every. Single. Day. And those people have preferences and opinions. Sometimes they gobble everything down without even looking at it, and sometimes they pick at their plates like little birds. Getting the quantities right is impossible. Choosing a meal that everyone will eat without complaining is impossible.

It all just feels like going on a snipe hunt but already knowing that snipes aren’t real. Someone has set me up for failure and I have no alternative but to play along.

And I say this as someone who honestly has very few barriers to getting a decent dinner on the table. I have enough money to buy whatever groceries I want. When he’s around, my husband is great about handling the children so I can cook without “helpers.” None of us has any food allergies or dietary restrictions or neurodivergent needs that might make eating food–new or otherwise–a struggle.

Meal planning is still the worst.

But here are a few things that have worked for me:

• Cooking meat on the weekend and using it throughout the week. David got a smoker a couple Christmases ago and I love it. If he smokes a pork shoulder or brisket or something, I can usually make three or four meals out of it with minimal effort. Related: sometimes I put David in charge of grilling something and I’ll just make sides. It takes significantly less effort on my part than doing a whole meal by myself.
• Relying heavily on “brainless crowd pleasers.” This is a Lazy Genius concept that has been super helpful. I have a list of meals that most of us will eat without fuss, even if they’re nobody’s favorite. A lot of them are made from pantry or freezer or fridge staples, so I always have ingredients on hand. They come together quickly. Probably two thirds of our meals fall into this category.
• Using a Google calendar to plan. I like this both for the archival aspect (I often scroll back through past months to see what I haven’t made in a while) and the flexibility. It’s easy to drag meals around to new days to accommodate any changes in plans. Or, you know, sometimes I just don’t feel like making whatever I had planned for a Tuesday, so I move it to Wednesday and bump something else into its place.
• Not feeling guilty about getting takeout. I allow myself at least one takeout day a week. We may not actually use it, but it’s there if we need it. Yes, it’s almost always more expensive than cooking. And yes, it’s probably not as nutrient-dense and low-sodium/sugar/preservatives as something I made from scratch. Ordering pizza or driving through Wendy’s or picking up Thai takeout is still feeding my family and is a valid option.
• Maintain low expectations. My children are young. My capacity for making gourmet meals is very small right now. Someday I will try time-consuming recipes with expensive ingredients and fancy names. Today is not that day. Nobody in my family expects that from me, so why should I expect it from myself?

A friend suggested I try a meal subscription service, which is one thing I haven’t done. You know, those companies that send you a box with all the ingredients for a specific meal to your door, so all you have to do is put it all together? I like the idea of not having to choose (because decision fatigue is always part of the problem) and not having to shop for ingredients (because going to the grocery store is much more of an ordeal these days than it used to be). Anyway, maybe I’ll give it a go. Couldn’t hurt, right?

And some day I’ll put more effort into teaching my kids to cook. Then I can offload some of the meal planning burden onto them. Because that’s why we have kids: so they’ll help us with all the chores we don’t want to do.

(I kid. Mostly.)

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