Going Back to Work and Eating Well

After having a baby, while on maternity leave, I began to realize that going back to work would be hard.  I realized one of the most difficult things was going to be making sure we had food that was healthy, easy to prepare, and wouldn’t take a lot of planning.

One day it hit me that what would work best for me was to be super planned.  So I sat down and made a list of 20 recipes that we liked, were easy to prepare, and would be nutritious.  I grouped these recipes into weeks so we would have variety (4 weeks with 5 recipes each week).  Then for the other two days of dinners we would either eat leftovers, be eating out or someone’s house, or I would be able to make a special recipe.

Then I took each weeks recipes and made a basic shopping list of what I would need each week.  So I had a shopping list for week 1, a list for week 2 etc.

On that shopping list I could add other things we might need but there was pretty much no meal planning that I had to do week to week.

I put all of this in a binder set up like this

Week one shopping list followed by week one recipes
Week two shopping list followed by week two recipes
etc

Each week before I went to the grocery store I just grabbed the shopping list for whatever week we were going to use, walked through my kitchen and marked off ingredients we already had, and added anything we might want for breakfast and lunches.  Menu planning took 5 minutes a week.  I had recipes that were easy, quick, and nutritious.

Here is my blank Shopping list.  What tricks do you have to make sure your family eats well in the business of life?