Meal Plan Monday No. 1

One thing I have learned over the past few years of struggling with my weight is, having a weekly meal plan is crucial for staying on track with eating right. It helps for a ton of reasons, but for me the biggest perk is knowing what's for dinner every night, and having all the ingredients in the house prevents any last minute ordering of pizza or takeout. Plus its nice to shop once and be done for the week.

Admittedly it can be hard to find clean recipes which are also family friendly and I think this is a huge part of why eating right can be such a struggle. Its so much easier to just bake up some nuggets & tots; nobody complains about a dinner like that! My kids actually like healthy food but they definitely don't want tilapia, asparagus, and brown rice every night. So I try to create meals that are versatile. For instance, we eat tacos on a weekly basis and it works because I can have a giant salad while the hubby and kids get to enjoy tortillas, and then there's leftovers to have yummy salads for lunch over the next few days.

It does require being organized; I sit down Monday morning and look at the calendar to figure out if Juston is going to be home at dinnertime or not (I don't grill - yet!), and what the weather is like (to see if we even can BBQ or not), and what evening plans we have (you don't want to plan a complex meal when you only have thirty minutes to cook and eat before rushing out the door). It sounds like a pain but once you do it a few times its not that bad.

I'm feeling pretty unmotivated to be creative this week so here are some of the meals I fall back on when I am feeling less than inspired.

Meals for 4/25 thru 4/29

M - spaghetti & Caesar salad. My clean trick with spaghetti is, I use cottage cheese instead of noodles and mix it up with the meat sauce in a bowl - it sounds gross & weird but I swear it tastes JUST like lasagna! Sometimes I will make a loaf of garlic bread for the guys but this week I'm not going to.
T - tacos. I use ground turkey and a homemade taco seasoning mix similar to this one, then spread out a "build your own taco" bar with refried beans, shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, tons of avocado (my kids love it), olives, cheese, sour cream, salsa, minced red onion, cilantro, and black beans. I mix the sour cream & salsa to use as dressing on my salad.
W - grilled steak & green salad. We have meeting (church) on this night so dinner has to be quick and possibly able to be eaten in the car ;) and also the leftovers need to be easy to throw in a Tupperware and toss in the fridge before rushing out the door.
Th - literally just as I was typing this a family member texted me saying they and a friend will be in town Thursday and could they come over for dinner? Yes of course! But having company means extra food and it needs to be on the yummier side. I'm thinking we'll try a new chicken marinade recipe and our favorite corn on the cob with chili lime butter. And for a carb side for all the normal eaters I'll just grab some dinner rolls. Easy peasy.
F - leftovers. I always schedule a free/leftover night during the week because something always comes up and I hate having a whole dinner's worth of food in the fridge that won't get cooked.
Sa/Su - I never plan meals for the weekends because we are always either entertaining or at someone else's house.

And there you have it. Super simple. The weekly meal plans for the month of May will be weird because Juston and I are going to be doing some fat cutting before we start working out in June but I am going to post them anyway. I hope you like cabbage. :)