Meal Planning

So I've been trying to wrap my head around meal planning for quite some time. I know I have to do it and I know it'll make my life easier, but for some reason the night before I head to the store I am am staring at a pad of paper wondering what the heck I'm going to buy!

I've spent the past week or two looking online, buying eBooks, and compiling all these lists of ideas and tips for meal planning. It is intimidating to say the least. I have learned that I do better working in stages. A few posts back I talked about how I was going to go through all of my recipes and root through ones I liked, categorize them by who can eat them in our house, and make a long list. Even that is too much for me. I seriously take the term "baby steps" to a new level for a 32 year old.

I recently saw something online that resonated with me. A GREAT blog is Wellness Mama. Seriously, I love this site. So many great recipes and I really dig a lot of her food philosophies. I went there today to try and figure out some good ideas for baby meals and her most recent post was this. Seven meal planning basics. Definitely give it a quick glance. She talks about having a template for each week and I want to try this. Here's my first crack at it:

1 stir fry
2 slow cooker
1 soup
1-2 different cuisine (Mexican, Indian, etc)
1-2 meals that can be prepped ahead and thrown in the oven

The Wellness Mama also suggests having 20 meals that are staples in your household. If you have 20 then you can plan on cooking 5 a week so that your family enjoys one every month. The other two nights you can try something new or eat left-overs. This is what I was looking for when I started going through my old recipes, but I like this idea of having a number to strive for. I'm going to spend the next 4-5 weeks trying to create this list of 20.