I have yet to come across a household where this question has not troubled anyone. EVERYONE has encountered it sometime or the other be it getting out of bed in the morning, leaving for work or even in the middle of an office meeting – this question is known to come up at the most inopportune times! It is the most annoying question for anyone who takes care of the meals for self/family. Answering it adequately is made more complicated by the fact that in India:
We like to eat freshly cooked meals. This needsorganizing and prepping, which takes time.
We eat combination meals viz., a sabzi (vegetable dish), a dal (Lentil), with all or some of these – Rice, Chapati, Salad, Curd/Raita, Papad, Pickle, maybe a beverage too. This requires a lot of unique permutations and combinations for each meal.
The Reality
This question cannot be avoided and this decision has to be taken for multiple daily meals. (This leads to Stress)
While the question remains the same, the answer has to be different and interesting each time. (This causes more stress)
Every single time when we start thinking of what to cook, we either call upon ours or our family members’ already stretched memories to throw up some options for choice. The top of mind recall mostly throws up the few options which ends up making our menus repetitive and boring.
Most of our menu decisions are made a little before meal time or on the day of the meal itself. This leaves us with less time to organize and prepare or to even consider ALL the options that can probably be cooked.
Deciding what to cook/eat, at the last minute, limits one’s choices and facilitates sub-optimal food decisions. Some decisions also backfire for being unimaginative or because they are unhealthy, being meals of convenience.
Ideally one should cater for a variety of foods in daily meals while also ensuring that the meals are healthy, balanced and are cooked as per the desired palate of self/family members.
But how does one do that amidst handling hordes of other responsibilities too? This can be easily done by meal planning.
What is Meal Planning?
Putting it very simply, Meal planning is the process of deciding what meals one wants to eat in the forthcoming days. It is an efficiency hack & a strategy to organize the daily repetitive tasks into manageable actions.
By having a meal plan, one reduces the daily stress, avoids the last-minute scramble and ensures that every meal is a winner in terms of health and taste.
Why is Meal Planning important?
Meal Planning helps us to save time, money, resources, prevent food wastage and reduce our daily stress, to name a few benefits. It also enables us to eat a variety of meals which are tasty and healthy.
Another important point to note is that our health is governed by factors like our genetic makeup, level of activity and our daily diets, to name a few. While little can be done about our genes, we can do a lot where exercise and nutrition are concerned.
But there’s a catch!
While exercise-discipline is something that the individual can manage well, the nutrition piece goes haywire for most people.
Note that our health is made in the kitchens, therefore, to be able to take best food decisions, we need to simplify our daily menu decision making process.
How do we do that
It is important to identify and acknowledge the roadblocks in the process of optimal decision making. What is it that prevents us from eating carefully crafted meals every day?
Limited time, resources & money notwithstanding, it is mostly our inability to retrieve multiple, distinct (tasty & healthy) meal options from the layers of our memories each day because of our limited mental bandwidth.
This is why we need to bring those ideas out of our crowded mind spaces and document them so that we can get a bird’s eye view of all our available options while deciding our daily menus.
STEP 1: CURATING THE FAMILY MENU
The first and THE most important step towards meal planning is having a list of options of foods/meals/dishes, handy and accessible, to choose one’s daily meals from and not rely on our memories for this. This is not difficult as one’s daily meals are mostly as per one’s own home’s culinary culture.
You may create this list in a notebook, in a spreadsheet or in an App. The key thing to remember is that this list has to be easily accessible to you at ALL times.
Taking inspiration from how a restaurant’s menu is sectioned into Breakfast items, Snacks, Main Course, Vegetarian/Non-Vegetarian Dishes, Desserts, …, you can make a list of everything you like/want to eat in your various meals.
Ideally one can start with options which:
are part of one’s own cuisine and culinary repertoire.
can be made with one’s existing kitchen infrastructure and the available resources.
are one’s/family’s favourite meals.
One may go on to add one’s preferred dishes of various ingredients and foods from different cuisines that one likes etc,.
The quality of your daily meals will be a reflection of your Family Menu. This is why you should put together the list accordingly viz., if you want to eat more protein or millets etc,. then incorporate those food ideas in your list.
A list of your meal ideas which is ‘available on demand’ for making daily menu choices will reduce stress and save on decision-time.
This is also a great opportunity to record one’s family’s culinary traditions. Involve your family members in curating and adding to this list as it inculcates a sense of ownership of the menu amongst everyone.
You will be pleasantly surprised at the diversity that you have in your own familiar cuisine and how extensive, interesting and full of variety this family menu becomes over time. Also, this curation will be completely unique to you and your household.
IMPORTANT
At the initial stage you should only focus on making this list such that it is easy to pick ideas from and be cooked without much hassle.
Include foods that you would ordinarily have as your meals. Do not make this a wish list of exotic meals just yet.
Your Family Menu is the foundation of a healthy meal planning habit so make sure that it is a strong one.
While curating your Family’s Menu seems tedious & time consuming initially but it goes a long way in ensuring that one will save time everyday hereafter while deciding daily menus.
STEP 2: CONSOLIDATING THE RECIPES
Recipes are very useful when one is learning how to cook. As the proficiency in cooking improves, so is the desire to try new recipes.
How many times have you asked someone for a recipe or saved one online?
Most recipes are duly saved but seldom/never used as they are scattered all over the online spaces and are not easy to find when needed. Pull together all those recipes/links scattered across cookbooks, bookmarks, Pinterest boards, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Email etc into one organized spot.
Cook at least one of these recipes every week and see which works for you. Remove the ones that don’t and keep your list clean.
Between your Family Menu and the Recipe collection, you will have enough and more (interesting) options for your daily meals.
Try to save this information in the same place as your Family Menu so that all the required information is in one place when you sit down to plan your meals.
What Next?
The creation of a FAMILY MENU is the single most important thing that one can do to ensure efficient meal planning. Everything else that follows next in the Meal Planning process will work well only if we have our Family Menus ready for use.
Once your menu is reasonably ready, you can simply choose what to cook from it everyday. However, some challenges will still remain which is why we need to simplify a bit more.
Interested to know HOW?
While managing the kitchen seems to be a daunting task, it is easier if we break down the kitchen tasks into these 4 basic steps:
Decide what to cook/eat for the next meal(s). Best done over the weekend and for at least next 3-4 days, if not more.
Take some time out to organise the required groceries, vegetables etc. Schedule some time for this.
Get the ingredients prepped in advance as per one’s meal plan viz., chop/ wash/ soak/refrigerate/knead/thaw…
Lastly, when it is time to prepare the meal, then one only needs to cook the prepped ingredients as per the recipes. Psst…This is the simplest part.
Truth be told Cooking is not as difficult as it is thought to be. It is actually the tasks preceding it viz., Plan, Organise & Prep which pose the real challenge.
But once one knows how to manage those, life is a breeze!
STEP 3: PLANNING THE MEALS
This should be done by oneself while the other tasks can be easily outsourced, remotely managed and monitored. This is because nobody else will be as invested in or clued into one/one’s family’s needs and preferences.
Also, remember that knowing what to cook/eat is more important than knowing how to cook.
This is an opportunity to make sure that one’s diets are balanced and include all the required nutrition to the extent possible. This also ensures that there is (good) food on the table at meal-times, especially when one is hungry and tired after a long day.
It is easier to make healthy food choices and fill any gaps, when all the choices are in sight.
If you have a reasonably good family menu list which is handy, it should not take you more than 10-15 minutes once every week to plan your meals of the next 7 days or so. I am speaking from experience. This is how it goes;
First, pick and choose your Dal, Sabzi, Rice or other meal combinations for each meal for next few days from your menu, as per your choice and what your schedule allows for.
Next review and identify these planned meals for any gaps, mis-match, resource or other constraints. – any early/late meetings, eating out plan, guests coming over, any other engagement, things to be bought etc.
Adjust your meal selections to fill the gaps or work around those constraints. For example, if you see that some meals/ days do not have optimal protein or vegetables then add those items to those meals. Or if you have a very busy work day, then you can plan for the simplest of meals or may plan to order in/eat out or cook a larger batch of food the previous day such that the leftovers can be eaten again the next day etc.
Do involve other stakeholders (your family members) in this decision making as it makes Meal Planning inclusive and reduces any possible expectation mis-match & conflict during meal times.
Meal Planning will take some practice but once you make your meal combinations & plans as per your needs, time and resources a few times, it gets better. Promise.
You can even repeat your weekly meal plans, if you like. The good part of home cooking is that the meals and their combinations can be repeated as per choice. In my own home, Rajma-Chawal are cooked at least once every 15-20 days (by choice) and no one complains!
STEP 4: ORGANISE & SHOP
Once the meal plan for the next few days is made, one needs to identify the items from the plan which need to be organized and purchased. Create a shopping list for the required items of one’s meal plan and any other items you may want to buy.
Having a shopping list ensures that one does not wander in the shopping aisles wondering what to buy or tempted to buy everything, just in case!
A Shopping List enables one to buy only what is needed & in quantities that one needs.
This prudence helps to save money, time and prevents wastage of precious resources.
STEP 5: PRE-PREPARING/PREPPING
If you know what is going to be cooked in the next few meals and the ingredients are available and handy then it allows one to do/get some prep done in advance.
Prepping is to peel & cut/dice/chop/cube vegetables or marinate ingredients, soak/grind/boil the dals/chana, knead the dough, weigh the ingredients as per recipe or calorie chart etc., ahead of time.
Prepping saves on effort and last-minute stress by having all the ingredients in a ready-to-cook form.
It improves one’s efficiency when it is time to cook.
STEP 6: COOKING
Everyone wants their food to be tasty. It is at the stage of cooking that one ensures that the food is appetizing by choosing appropriate recipes which cater to one’s/family’s palates.
As mentioned already and contrary to popular belief, cooking is the easiest of the Kitchen tasks and is not as tedious as perceived.
Once you know what is to be made and the ingredients have been purchased and prepped, all that is left to do is to mix the ingredients over a flame.
If you find this hard to believe just take a look at any cooking channel and check out the Chef showing how to cook a recipe.
The Chef is able to do everything with aplomb because all the three previous tasks (planning what to cook, organizing & prepping) have already been taken care behind the scenes.
See, what I mean?
That is all there is to Meal Planning, really.
Even though this may seem like a lot of work, it is really not. The most difficult part here (like anywhere else) is getting started. Remember that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
The rewards of Meal Planning are many- like getting to eat your choice of meals which are good, healthy and tasty & all this with no stress! While the joy of looking forward to thoughtfully planned meals is something else altogether, Meal Planning is liberating in more ways than one! Do give it a try.
Amiyaa is a unique Meal Planning App for the daily meal planning requirements of the Indian Homes. It is available on both Play Store & App Store.
EXPLORE. PLAN. COOK. SHARE. RELAX
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