Living Life with Littles: Meal Prep

One of the things that I am finding so helpful each week is "meal prep".  Every few weeks I go through our freezers and see what we have.  I then sit down and come up with about 15 to 20 different meals I can I make from what we have.  Every Saturday I take that list and meal plan for the week.  Based on that meal plan, I spend a chunk of time on Sunday prepping meals for the week.  I do as much prep work as possible at the beginning of the week to make the meals ready to go.

For the particular week I'm writing about in this post our meal plan looked like this:

• Sunday: Non-soup Chicken and Noodle Soup (kids) and Steak and Pasta Salad (adults)
• Monday: Lasagna, homemade bread, veggie
• Tuesday: Hamburgers and hotdogs, sweet potato fries, pasta salad (left from Sunday)
• Wednesday: Sandwich, applesauce
• Thursday: Chicken and Rice Soup
• Friday: Pizza
• Saturday: Leftovers, extras, raid the cabinets

When I prepped this is what I had ready for the week:

• Sunday: Supper made
• Monday: Lasanga, flour mixture for bread ready for bread machine
• Tuesday: hamburgers thawed and made, hotdogs thawing, pasta salad
• Thursday: soup thawing
• Friday: pizza dough made 

I learned a good lesson on why it's important for me to do this.  Nothing this particular week went the way I planned.  Sunday night I accidentally poked Sweet Pea in the eye, needing medical attention on Monday and Tuesday.  Tuesday and Thursday school was cancelled due to snow.  Tuesday Tony hit a snow drift on the way to work and wrecked his battery.  We had to drive into town (30 minutes) to get him on Tuesday night and back again on Wednesday morning.  On the way home Wednesday the van gave out on us.  Thursday Tony got it running well enough to get it to a shop.  Even with all that we had yummy, warm, home cooked meals, all week.  I know it saved us from going out to eat Tuesday.  We also felt like we were still eating well and didn't have the stress of scrambling last minute to figure out supper.  My weeks go better when I prep the meals at the beginning.