My Lifesaver List for Easy Meal Planning

I’ve been planning meals for YEARS. I often ask myself how anyone can go to the store with no idea what they’re going to eat that week, it doesn’t make sense in my brain. But I also know that it takes all kinds of people to make this world go round so this topic of meal planning is no different. I know some will resonate with this and some won’t, and that’s okay. Take what you want from the post and leave the rest ☺️ 

Having done this meal planning thing for many years, you can imagine that there were some days, many days, that I would sit to write the plan and my mind would be blank. I would go onto Pinterest and be even more overwhelmed and blank in my mind. I don’t know, just something about having SO many options available to me makes my mind shut down even more. I know someone can understand that 🙃

So, I decided to make a list of core meals that I knew my family would eat and would make my meal planning easier on those days that my brain was mush 🫠 If I needed just one more meal to complete the list or 6, I had something I could refer to in order to get the meals planned quickly.

I’m sure there is somebody out there that can understand how some weeks you can plan a week’s worth of dinner’s no problem, the meals just come to you. But, other weeks, the struggle is real! You could be sitting there for hours before an idea comes to your brain!

These meals have changed throughout the years since I started doing this, but they are generally easy to make with simple ingredients. I feel like each season I have a few that I add in or change out depending on if we are sick of the other meals yet or not (aka my brain was mush A LOT and we ate them often 😄).

Here are my family’s 6 for this summer:

Ham steaks, mashed potatoes, and frozen corn

Crispy chicken salad

BLT’S

Cheeseburgers with fries

Make Your Own Italians

Daddy’s Homemade Pizza

This small list has saved me so many times. It is so nice to have something already thought up and I can refer to when my brain is just not working right. I promise if you do this too, your brain will thank you 🙂