#118: Advanced Meal Planning Strategies

This is the final episode in our Meal Plan Like a Pro Series, and today we're helping you go beyond the basics with advanced meal planning techniques.

When you are an advanced meal planner, you're able to adapt and make changes on the fly without getting flustered. You become a meal planning strategist. In this episode, we discuss three strategies that advanced planners can use to get the most out of their meal plans. Plus, we break down how you can make these strategies possible with Plan to Eat!

Find Amylee's interview mentioned in this episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1869657/episodes/10944566

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Advanced Planning Strategies
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[00:00:00] I'm Riley and I'm Roni. And this is the plan to eat podcast, where we have conversations about meal planning, food, and wellness. To help you answer the question what's for dinner. 

Roni: Hello, welcome back to the Plan to Eat Podcast. We are in our final episode of our meal plan, like a pro series, and today we are focused on more advanced strategies for meal planning. And we're kind of going to the specifics of Plan to Eat today because most likely you use Plan to Eat if you listen to this podcast.

And if you're looking for more advanced strategies, we hope you are thinking about features that you could use in Plan to Eat to do it.

Riley: Just as an aside, in case you aren't a Plan to Eat customer right now. Plan to Eat is still very usable for new, for beginners, but because we have so many features, it goes above and beyond. Like wherever you fall. In the spectrum of being a planner, you can use Plan to Eat, so the more you grow the [00:01:00] program kind of grows with you because you have, you kind of unlock all these extra features that you can use as you learn.

Roni: I like that. I like thinking about it that way. Like you kind of grow, you can grow up together with Plan to Eat in your planning journey.

Riley: I just wanted to make sure that people listening didn't think that it was just something really advanced. 'cause you know, we've tried to definitely weave in features, but we've also talked very much about meal planning, just as a concept and like how you do it and what you do. And, I mean, most of what we talked about so far can be done with pen and paper.

It is just so much easier with a tool like Plan to Eat.

Roni: Yeah, a hundred percent. So ultimately we're hoping that as an advanced meal planner, you become a meal planning strategist. So Riley, talk to us about what that means.

Riley: I think that when you become a meal planning strategist, nothing, like, nothing really thwarts your plans. And it's not that things don't come up 'cause they do for every single person who's a meal planner, right? 'cause that's life. But you can be super adaptable. Um, you can be [00:02:00] more willing and ready and.

Like willing and ready to change things on the fly. Whereas I know for new planners, it can feel very paralyzing when something comes up because they're like, but I plan to have this dinner tonight, and what am I gonna do? You know? And it's like, well, hey, you know what?

We can switch things, we can move it, we can freeze that. We can, you know what, we'll call an audible ball together. We'll just use this perishable good and we'll have something totally different. Um, so as a meal planning strategist, you control the plan, like, and it doesn't control you, doesn't get, you know, it doesn't make you stressed out when things don't go according to plan.

It just is, you can just go with the flow.

Roni: I was thinking about this like meal planning strategist as the idea of like meal planning becoming more of an identity for you.

Riley: Oh, interesting.

Roni: Like in the, so in the book, atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the ways that he talks about establishing a habit into your life is to change the way that you identify with your habit.

So I think that there are a lot of people who maybe are not natural [00:03:00] planners, and that is the identity that they have sort of adapted is like, I'm not a natural planner. I'm not naturally organized, and so meal planning isn't for me. Really the goal would be to shift that mindset and shift your identity to be like, actually I am a meal planner, and it's not necessarily because I'm amazing at meal planning, but it's because I meal plan every week.

Riley: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Roni: And like hopefully you get, hopefully you get better at it and you do become amazing at meal planning, but also that's like a moving target, right? Just like we talked about last week with the learn and adapt situation. Like you're always learning and adapting. So there's gonna be some weeks even as a quote unquote advanced meal planner where you're gonna be like, yeah, that didn't work the way I wanted it to.

Riley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely don't think that being a meal planning strategist means that there aren't times where things fail, but I really like what you, I really like what you had to say just then because, it is a mindset shift. It says, take ownership of something that you do, and I think all the benefits of meal planning kind of become woven [00:04:00] into.

I dunno. You just kinda adopt them like, well I know we're gonna save money at the store because I meal plan, or I'm gonna meal plan 'cause it's Sunday night and you know, we've, you know, that's, I planned last week on Monday night or Sunday night or whatever. Now it's time to do it again. And it doesn't even have to be a to-do necessarily on your to-do list.

It just becomes a part of your rhythms.

Roni: I mean, at this point I it's scary to me to think about not having a meal plan. You know, and I know we've talked about our own systems before, right? Like I don't necessarily plan for a specific number of days ahead of time. Like when I'm creating my meal plan, I add. Approximately four to five recipes on to the calendar and however long those last is, however long those last.

Sometimes those five recipes only last five days. Sometimes those five, five recipes last us eight to nine days because they had lots of leftovers or something else came up, whatever it is. And when I get to, when I open my meal planner to the last day that there's a recipe planned, I'm like, oh my gosh, I need [00:05:00] to figure this out.

'cause it feels really stressful at this point. To not have a meal plan because I feel like I can no long, I feel like I can hardly wing it anymore. I really need a plan in place for, to feel not stressed about food.

Riley: I mean, but think about any other habit in your life and what other habits do you feel that way about Like, I'm thinking the gym, like I have a routine with the gym and when it's time to go. I go and if I don't get to go, then I'm like, oh no. When am I gonna do it? I have to, I have to, you know, or, I mean, if, if you're a regular walker, I have felt this way too when I've been like, 'cause especially in the summertime, I would get up and go for a walk at like seven every, every morning and it's like, it's like you're just ready to do this thing, or even bedtime.

Think about how bedtime your bedtime habits, your, your body becomes very ready to do that thing when you're in that habit.

Roni: yeah, yeah. It's it's interesting because I think we talk so much about. Starting meal planning to reduce the stress of dinner or meal times, whatever. Right. And then I think [00:06:00] once it becomes more of this like advanced or like identity driven situation, like you don't, you don't have that stress on the front end anymore.

'cause you're like, I'm, I got this. I can totally meal plan, not a big deal. But there is like this little bit of stress that trickles in when you don't have a meal plan and you're like, oh, I don't even know what to do. Or like when we often, when we go on vacation. I don't necessarily meal plan. I guess it kind of depends on what the vacation situation is.

If we're like going to a foreign country, often don't meal plan. If we're just going to, someplace that we just drive to in the state, you know, um, I will sometimes plan a recipe or two, but in general, I don't really plan during for vacation and I don't like that. Actually, that's actually probably gonna be a goal of mine next year, is to like, try to remember to meal plan for vacations a little bit better.

Because once I get on vacation, if we have a night where we're like, well, we don't wanna go out to eat, or We're tired of spending money. I get my, my mind goes [00:07:00] blank as to like what I could possibly go to the grocery store and just pick up really quick. And it's like almost always, fajitas is, the only thing I can think of is like, we'll just buy some meat and we'll buy some bell peppers and some onion, some tortillas.

We'll make fajitas. It'll be fine. But like you can't eat fajitas five nights in a row.

Riley: Yeah, that's funny. I even, I even have that on my list under being a meal planning strategist, is that it becomes so ingrained in your habits and it becomes so much a part of you and you're so good at it that you might even plan on vacation.

Roni: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that you should, I think I probably should start, I, like I said, I think I need to start doing that because, because otherwise we do just res resort to being like, well, we don't really know what we're doing. Let's just like get some pizza or whatever. I, yeah. It's, it's not a great system.

Riley: I keep thinking about you, about what you said about being stressed when you get to the end of the meal the week and you haven't made your new meal plan. And it's so interesting though, because any good habit has good consequences, you know, and any bad [00:08:00] habit has bad consequences, right?

So, you don't meal plan, you wing it, which means the consequences are you eat out a lot. Your grocery budget's blown. You don't have all the ingredients you need. You have to go to the store multiple times. You're throwing away food that you don't, didn't have a plan for. Whereas like the good consequences are that all the opposites of those, right?

Like you know exactly. You're not throwing away food, you're saving money. And so it's like your body is now used to those good consequences and you're like, oh, I have to go because otherwise bad things happen.

Roni: Yeah, absolutely. This is a, I'm gonna redirect us slightly because this is just something that came to mind as we're talking about being a more advanced meal planner and being able to, it came to mind when you were talking about adapting and changing things on the fly. So actually this week when I was at the grocery store.

I really, well, I had it on my meal plan that I was gonna make, um, Mississippi Pot Roast. It's the recipe that you have. It's such a good recipe for Mississippi Pot Roast, [00:09:00] and there were zero roasts at the grocery store. Chuck Roast was like on sale, and so everybody had gobbled them up and. So I was left to either be like, well, I could buy like a really expensive cut of meat and turn it into the pot roast, but that seems silly because I wanna eat steak as steak, not as a pot roast.

And so instead I just decided to, I was like, okay, it's fine. I'm just gonna move this recipe to next week, hopefully next week when I go to the grocery store, there's gonna be pot roast, or there's gonna be a chuck roast that I can buy, and now I have to figure out a recipe to replace it with. So, I mean, it was awesome to be in the grocery store and there was a little bit of like, uh, I'm not really sure what I wanna buy.

you know, in just a couple minutes I was able to swap out the recipe and have the new ingredients added to my shopping list and. I dunno. It's just a good example I think of, I think that there's a point in time where I would've just [00:10:00] been like, nevermind, we're not doing anything for dinner on Tuesday night because there's no Chuck Roast available.

Riley: Well, and how often do you change things in the store with a paper list and then you're having to like, oh, what do I need for that? Or even if you pull up a recipe in the middle of a store to find the things. So, so often I skip things or I assume I have it at home and I'm not at home to check, and then I don't get the things I need.

So just being able to add that new meal to your meal plan, all those ingredients added to your shopping list, and you go, you just do it, and it's so, so much simpler.

Roni: Yeah, I'm thinking of the, yeah, this like, you have a paper list and then you also have a recipe pulled up on your phone and you're doing this back and forth between like, what's on the paper list, what's on the recipe in my phone? Am I in the right aisle? Did I forget the things? Oh wait, no, I have to go two aisles back because we didn't get ground sage or whatever you, but you know, like there, it's such, it's so much more time consuming.

It's, yeah, I don't like

Riley: [00:11:00] Simultaneously, like, I actually hate having anything in my hands while I'm grocery shopping. Like, I don't like the phone or the paper list. Like I'll just like lay it in the cart and then just like, tap, tap, tap. Or Yeah. uh, and so like then you're holding all these things and you're trying to grab things off the shelf and it just becomes an overstimulating experience.

Roni: Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe it.

Riley: Let's transition and start talking about meal planning for the long haul. Talk to us about that.

Roni: Yeah, so I think this is one of the more advanced strategies. In our last couple episodes we talked about, you know, we talked about just meal planning for three days at a time, if meal planning feels really overwhelming to you, and then getting to the point where you're planning for this like seven to 10 days at a time.

But I think a advanced meal planning strategy is actually meal planning for the entire month. Now this is not something that Riley and I actively do. So we're really just speaking based off of what we know from customer experiences and people that we've talked to. But this is like a really popular [00:12:00] way, I think, for people to meal plan, particularly if you're somebody who doesn't actually like meal planning that much.

I feel like you might as well just meal plan for an entire month and kind of like get it out of the way and then just like, check in weekly with your meal plan to be like, are these still the recipes that we wanna have?

Do I wanna switch anything around? So when I talked to Rebecca zip on the podcast, she is somebody who has used Plan to Eat for a really long time and she meal plans in a monthly meal planning style. And so she does exactly that. She meal plans for the entire month ahead and. Every week she just does a check-in. She does a check-in with her meal plan.

She does a check-in with her family to make sure that the things that are on her meal plan for that specific week are actually like, work with their schedule, work with what they wanna, what they're in the mood for. You know, like maybe the weather has suddenly turned either much warmer, much colder and they wanna switch things up.

And I think that that's a really good tactic to have if you're trying to meal plan for an entire month is not like you meal plan for the [00:13:00] month and you set it and forget it. You know, like I think if you meal plan for the month, you do need to be checking in and making sure like, oh, we didn't use up our avocado, all of our avocados, but we have a recipe that calls for guacamole this week.

You know, making sure that you don't need to do any of these like last minute things or, you know, we have, we now have a school recital on Thursday night and I cannot make this fancy recipe that was gonna take me two hours to cook.

Riley: I also, I, I mean, I remember we, I don't remember who we interviewed. You'll probably have to remind me right now, but she meal plans for the whole month out of necessity because of when they got paid. Do you

Roni: Oh, that was Amy Lee.

Riley: Amy Lee? Yeah. So she would meal plan once a month because their budget only allowed for one grocery trip.

And I just, I've just been mulling this over like it is such a luxury to be able to go to the grocery store once a week. It's a luxury to have, random things in your cart that you weren't planning to buy, you know, like, and so meal planning for a month can really come out of necessity.

But I feel like those are the people who are incredibly good at meal [00:14:00] planning because it, they, it is a necessity. They absolutely have to be good at meal planning because they have to stretch their entire budget for an entire month. Or it's just simpler, you know, like I, I do think there's a lot more benefits to meal planning for an entire month than just being incredibly good at meal planning.

There's some other little pieces of this that kind of play in here, but, uh, I think, I think I personally would find it very challenging. I've been trying to extend my meal plan out to 10 days and so I'm spending a little bit more on a grocery trip, but we're going a little bit longer. Uh, and even that adjustment has been a little bit hard for me, but going for a whole month I think would be a really good trial.

I think I should try this and do a little test and see how it goes for me.

Roni: I would like to try it too actually, because I do think that there's an element of it where I talked about feeling stressed when the meal plan like runs out, you know? And so it's like, oh, if I look at my meal plan and I have recipes planned for the whole rest of the month, like voila, no more stress about the meal plan running out.

Riley: Yeah, I think the thing that would get me is like just fruits and vegetables, [00:15:00] fresh fruits and vegetables that I would want to add in. And obviously meal planning for a whole month doesn't mean you're only making one grocery trip. It did for Amy Lee, but it doesn't necessarily mean that for everyone. But one way to.

Like navigate that would be to have like two different stores in your planned eat shopping list. One that's for perishable and one for non-perishable. And then once you create your mul monthly plan, you store items. And then that way, you know, if you're halfway through the month and you don't have those avocados that you needed, like you mentioned earlier, you can make the trip for those, like that next batch of things.

But that, but the non-perishables, you can literally buy upfront.

Roni: Yeah. Yeah. I think generally that's what we recommend to people is like you buy all of your non-perishables in one go, and then when you do this kind of like weekly check-in, or maybe it's every day, every 10 day check-in for your meal plan, that's maybe when you would go to the grocery store another time to buy, you know, all of this super perishable things.

Lettuce and cilantro and your avocados and berries and things like that. In plan to eat. So like, the way that I would recommend [00:16:00] doing this in plan to eat is when you're doing your big bulk monthly shopping trip, you just update the date range on your shopping list for the entire month. So that way you're seeing all of your non-perishables for the entire month.

And then when it comes to your week to week shopping, just update the date range to the week or 10 days that you're shopping for, for those perishable items. And it's just gonna populate those things, only that you need for those recipes for the next seven to 10 days or whatever.

Riley: Yeah, that's perfect. Perfect way to do that.

Roni: Another advanced meal planning strategy is to do a batch cook and freeze schedule. Now, this could look like you set one day aside every month and you do lots of batch cooking and then freeze a bunch of recipes. You could even join a freezer meal club. I think that was also an idea we learned from Amy Lee.

Or like Riley has talked about multiple times, this idea of just when you're cooking on any. If night of the week, you could just make a double batch and then put the extra in the freezer so that you have some frozen [00:17:00] recipes for on hand for later.

Riley: I mean I've said this on the podcast so many times, so obviously I love this one, but this is the best way. I mean, I've done freezer meals like where I have set out to make 12 and I make 12, and then I put 'em all in the freezer. But like for the. A rhythm of my life. Like that's usually more for like a big event, like I'm about to have a kid or my husband's about to have surgery or something along those lines.

But for the rhythm rhythms of my life, just like making a meal and then freezing part of it has become a very system. Like, it's just very, almost do it without thinking at this point. Like for example, last night I made this like bacon pumpkin soup, which is so good. And I text Roni and I was like, Hey, do you want some?

And she was like, do you don't wanna freeze it? And I'm like, you know, normally I would, and it's funny because you even know now, like when I've got leftovers, they go in my freezer. But like last night I just didn't want, I just wanted to share. But it just has become such a part of my meal planning process and my pudding food away process that.

It and it, and it's really, I mean like we pull those meals out and eat them. Like they're not just going into the [00:18:00] abyss, you know? Uh, and it's really just become a really helpful way to, for me to meal plan.

Roni: Yeah, I think that this is an area that I could probably improve on because generally if we have leftovers from a recipe or I cook a recipe and purposefully make a double batch, it's 'cause we want leftovers. And We've talked a lot before about how like your husband is not necessarily a leftovers person, so you are the only one in your house who really ends up eating a lot of the leftovers.

But both me and my husband like leftovers quite a bit, and I really like it when there's one or two nights of the week where I don't have to cook. You know, it's literally just putting things in the microwave to reheat them, and that's really nice. So this is an area that I don't. I don't do much of the batch cooking and freezing, and I actually have found that when I do batch cook and freeze, I forget about those freezer recipes.

Like they just kind of like whisk away from my brain and then I'm like sorting through the freezer and I'm like, oh, we have like this lasagna in here. Maybe we should eat that [00:19:00] sometimes soon.

Riley: when did I make this?

Roni: Yeah. Yeah.

Riley: So what can you do about that and plan to eat, Roni?

Roni: Well, that would be a great time to use the freezer feature in Plan to Eat. Uh, so in Plan to Eat, once you have a recipe on your meal planner, you can then add it as a prep for freezer meal. So. When you prep it for the freezer, uh, the program asks you how many meals do you want to add into your freezer, and how many servings for each meal.

So say you're making a lasagna, and each pan of lasagna has, you know, serve six people. You're making three pans of lasagna. You would have three meals and they have six servings each. And so when you go and update those numbers, for your freezer prep. It then will tell you the total number of servings that you're actually buying ingredients for.

So if you're buying like 24 servings of ingredients, all of those things are gonna update on your shopping list. So that way you're actually buying in bulk so that you can then cook in bulk. [00:20:00] And the plant freezer will then keep track of the day that you had that on your planner. Um, so then in your freezer section you can see like, oh, I froze this on October 15th and.

You know, maybe when December 15th rolls around, you should probably be eating it,

Riley: Totally. And you know, just as a good reminder, like don't hoard them. You do want to eat them. Like that's how you know. I, uh, I don't know if you guys remember, but over the summer I had my little meal planning template and one of the things on my meal planning template was something frozen. And so that would kind of force me, like push me in the direction of eating the foods that I'd frozen, or just using like maybe proteins or frozen vegetables that have just kind of been living in there for a while.

It was a really, just if you're somebody who's got a lot of stuff frozen and you never use it, that was a really helpful way for me to kinda use some of those things up.

Roni: I think it's a good idea if you do this method of cooking and freezing. Recipes or even just individual ingredients. Maybe you, maybe you [00:21:00] prep a bunch of things and then you put certain, certain one. Certain extras in the freezer I think is a good idea to make sure you're doubled.

Double checking your inventory both in plan to eat, making sure that what you have in plan to eat matches what's actually in your freezer. It can be really easy to just like pull something out of your physical freezer and not look at what you actually had in Plan to Eat like have those numbers get skewed.

So good to be like checking in both places. 'cause plan, eat can also then remind you like, oh yeah, we did freeze a bunch of pumpkin soup. That would be great to pull out and have this week.

Riley: Yeah. You can look in your freezer and Plan to Eat instead of in your actual freezer.

Roni: Right. Exactly. Mm-hmm.

Riley: And the really wonderful thing about it is that when you pull one of those meals out, it does reduce the number in the freezer, and then when you pull the last one out, it's deleted. And so it, if you're actually, if you're actively using it, it's actively updating.

Roni: Exactly.

Riley: Yeah. One thing, one more thing about freezer meals, actually, if you are doing like a monthly. Meal plan. [00:22:00] You know, I just said I had the added that into my template. That could be a way that you use, you use what you've frozen and you just say, okay, for four weeks, every Thursday night we're having something frozen.

And then you meal plan around it. It's almost an anchor point, you know? 'cause then it kind of keeps you like using what you've purchased and can honestly really lower your grocery budget. But.

Roni: Yeah.

Riley: Okay. Last thing I would say is don't forget that batch cooking can mean meal prep, and batch cooking once a week.

I know a lot of people who do this and it's the way they meal plan fully. Like they buy enough things to have, you know, five meals of dinner and they prep it all on Sunday and then it's done the entire week. It is not my preferred method because like we've talked about, my family doesn't love leftovers.

I do love leftovers, so, you know, but it is nice, just like even if you just pre chop all your vegetables on Sunday, maybe wash and chop fruit as needed. You know, I dunno, maybe you buy blocked cheese and you just need to chop it up into little cubes or slices or whatever, or shred it. Um, you know, having these things [00:23:00] on like once a week, it just as a reminder, that can be a really helpful way to like batch cook.

Roni: I think that's good to mention that because it. Is a stress reducer. I

Riley: Yeah.

Roni: part if you're, if you're somebody who's, who doesn't enjoy cooking that much, I think this is a great way to reduce the stress of cooking is to just like, I find that if I have a, a night of the week where I do just make like a big batch of chicken or something, or a big batch of ground beef.

And so like, you know, like the main, time consuming part of a recipe is already done and then it's like, oh, we can just make these into tacos. Or, you know, I can make like a slaw and we'll do like a salad. Like just like having your individual pieces that you then prep into something else really quickly.

It's, it's nice. Yeah, and if you're a busy person and you get off of work and don't really feel like you have the energy or the time to cook a full meal, I definitely recommend this, this situation.

Riley: Same similar to meal planning in like a month [00:24:00] to month kind of way. Menus, menus in Plan to Eat. I'm specifically referring to the menus feature in Plan to Eat. Um, is a great way to save time and brain space when it comes to meal planning.

Roni: Yeah, so menus in Plan to Eat is not. Just your meal plan, right? Some people use the term meal plan and menu interchangeably, but menus as an actual feature in plan to eat that allows you to save your meal plans from your planner or to create a whole new meal plan and save it so that you can reuse it again and again and again and again.

One of the, I think one of the best. Most common uses for menus for a lot of people is like holiday meal plans. So like you eat the same five recipes every Thanksgiving or every Christmas or every Hanukkah celebration and somebody's birthday. Exactly. And so you can create a menu with those recipes in there so you don't have to go searching through your recipe book to find the coveted five recipes.

They just all can live in a menu. You can really easily [00:25:00] drag and drop it. Onto your planner and then have your meal plan made for you. But this can also just be something that you do, week to week, you know, biweekly. Once a month you can create these meal plans and just quickly add them to your planner.

And then you're done planning, you know, like you have a meal plan that you made and you saved it. And when you go to reuse it. All of the, all of the energy and time that you put into making the meal plan the first time, then transfers into like a lifetime of meal plans, essentially.

Riley: Yeah. Yep. There's two ways to do this. One, you can create a menu just from scratch inside of the menu. Edit menu editor, like open it up, make a meal plan for one week, four days, 65 days, like whatever you wanna do, and save it.

And you can name them things. Alternately, if you have, you know, when you have those weeks of meal planning, you're like, that was a banger. Like, we loved it. Like everybody loved everything and it, you know, whatever. It froze. Well, it reheated well. Everybody ate everything. We [00:26:00] loved it. Save it. Save it as a fa you know, save it, name it, family favorites.

So you can kind of do this as you're going along. And then suddenly you've got six or seven or eight menus. Or you can go in and make all of them from scratch as you want. So I just think it's super helpful because you can build it as you go and then it's, you're just like doing two things at once.

Killing two birds with one stone.

Roni: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think that's why I kind of consider menus to be more of an advanced meal planning tactic is because you do. You don't wanna just save any old meal plan. I don't feel like, you know, if you're like, oh, well this meal plan was only 50% successful, I don't think you save that meal plan.

I think you sit, you save the one that's a banger, you save the one that everybody loved, all the recipes and the week flowed really well. I think those are the types of meal plans to save. And so if you're new to meal planning and you are still in the really hard learn and a and adapt cycle, I'm not sure that menus.

Are great for you unless you know that you have four or five family [00:27:00] favorite recipes that everybody is always going to eat and they're, you know, really simple. Maybe they're your recipes that you can make on autopilot. And so then you create that one meal plan and you save it and you're just like, this is our autopilot, super easy, family favorite.

It's our fallback on menu when I am feeling like I have no idea what I'm doing.

Riley: Yeah. Yeah. And if you are somebody who's sitting here thinking like, oh man, that does sound pretty advanced. You can also, there is no time limit to the meal plans you've made in the past, so you can go in the past and save what you've already done as menus. So, I mean, this is kind of one of those like never ending features and there's no limit. You can't, you know, you can't, 

Roni: Yeah. If you've been using Plan to Eat since 2018, you can go back to 2018 and save some of those meal plans if you really want to.

Riley: Yeah.

Roni: It's really cool.

Riley: Yeah. I mean, this is my argument to people who say that, you know, they have to meal plan over and like adulthood is just meal planning over and over and over until you die. Well, you've already done it. Like why? Why do it [00:28:00] again if you've already done it?

Roni: You don't need to reinvent the wheel.

Riley: You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Use a digital meal planning tool like Plan to Eat.

And all you have to do is either drag and drop your meal plan from six months ago to today, or save it as a menu. Literally drag it on to next week's meal plan and it's done. Shopping list is made. Meal plan is made. Boom, you're done.

Roni: I know that there's a lot of, other meal planning tools out there. I'm thinking like physical meal planners that, you know, people have created. And a lot of them are basically this style of planning. It's, it's the idea of our menus feature, but in like a pen and paper format where, you know, you plan for the next two weeks and then you just basically repeat it.

And then you repeat it, and then you repeat it and maybe at some point in time in the year, you switch out a few of the recipes. But a lot of the pen and paper meal planners teach people how to meal plan this way because it does take a lot of the like mental drain and

Riley: Yeah.

Roni: Yeah, and the decision fatigue out of meal planning.

So [00:29:00] if that's the, the style of meal planning that you came from, maybe when you started plan toeat, you were using some of these physical planners, I think that menus would work really seamlessly into your life.

Riley: Yeah, totally. Yep.

Roni: One of our people, we've talked to her a couple different times on the podcast. She has her own her own podcast as well. Her name's Mackenzie Koppa, and she has consistently talked about how much she loves the menus feature, and she has menus set out for like one to two months at a time where she will just talk about.

She, you know, she's kind of a planning expert and so she talks about how it's such an amazing time saver to just be able to drag and drop your two month meal plan onto the next two months of your calendar. And then of course you do, you know, your check-in every once in a while, but you just meal planned for two whole months and it took you about eight seconds.

Riley: Yeah, if that,

Roni: Amazing.

Riley: yeah, highly recommend.

Roni: We highly recommend the menus feature. We highly recommend all the features, but particularly if you're feeling [00:30:00] like, okay, I'm like paying money for this meal planner, but like I'm still spending a lot of time meal planning every week, check out menus.

Riley: Yeah. And if you are a customer who maybe has like stopped using Plan to eat. I just feel like saying this, we don't delete anything out of your account. If you stop paying us, we don't delete it. Now, if you emailed us and said, please delete me, we'll delete it. But um, if you haven't and you are a customer who's maybe just like you listen to our podcast 'cause you like us, I don't know.

Roni: Hmm.

Riley: but you haven't used Plan to eat in a while. Everything that you have previously planned and all your recipes are still inside of Plan to Eat because we don't delete it. And so you can renew. Maybe during our sale, you can renew whenever you want to. Plug in the sale, but renew, and then it's all still there.

So you can use this menus feature. You can get right back into it. You can go look at six months ago, eight months ago, five years ago. It's all there. And you can start, you can start without it being a burden to start.

Roni: Absolutely. Yeah, that's a really good point. All right, so those are our top three. [00:31:00] Advanced meal planning strategies and how you can accomplish them in plan to eat. If you have some other advanced strategies that we didn't talk about today, we would love to hear about 'em. You can always email us at podcast@plantoeat.com.

We love hearing from our listeners and I think now it's time to move on to a few dinner dilemmas.

Riley: All right. First up, we have one from someone named Kerry. Kerry says, I always get excited about making extra ingredients to quotes, save myself work, but then I don't know what to do with it and end up wasting the food. In the last few weeks, I've thrown away pressure cooked beans, roasted carrots, sliced eggplant, cooked rice.

When it works, it's great and does save me time and effort, but around half the time, I just end up throwing away food.

Roni: Okay, so this is the downside I guess of, of that batch prep that we talked about is that sometimes maybe you prep a little too much or maybe you get tired of the things or. You dunno how to maybe put 'em into a new [00:32:00] recipe That sounds fun and exciting. I would say my first tip is use the freezer. Put things in the freezer when you start to feel like maybe they're getting a little iffy, all of these things that they mentioned here.

Cooked beans, roasted carrots, sliced eggplant, cooked rice, they can all freeze beautifully and then you can take 'em out of the freezer on a day when. You need one of those things. They are going to, you know, the, particularly like the roasted vegetables and stuff, the texture might be slightly different when you take it out of the freezer just because of the free thaw, freeze and thaw cycle.

But I'm thinking like roasted carrots, egg plants, that sounds like a really nice, like roasted vegetable soup. You know, it could be in addition to a roast of vegetable soup.

Riley: With those beans, throw 'em all in there

Roni: the beans you could make like a roasted vegetable dip or a hummus or something. That would be really good. Uh, I'm pretty much always gonna lean on the freezer.

I actually. I text you about this last week. Our refrigerator like froze a bunch of stuff in it. It was like set to, [00:33:00] I think the thing that happened is we had some family in town and our refrigerator has this button that's like power. Cool. I don't know why it exists. Why would you wanna power? Cool.

Anyways, I think it accidentally got pressed and then our refrigerator got really cold. Um,

Riley: Cool.

Roni: it was powerful.

Riley: Yeah.

Roni: Um, and so like I had this whole, like, I had, I, when I buy cottage cheese, I buy the, like, big one and it's like a gallon 

Riley: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 

Roni: And like that was frozen, like rock solid. And after it thawed, it was still totally edible.

Like the texture was slightly different. I would say if you're in the cottage cheese trend of like putting cottage cheese inside of everything right now, it probably would've been better to put into like a smoothie or pancakes or, you know, something where you're blending it. But I, I mean, I ate it just as it was.

So that's just to say like, we've talked about the freezer a whole bunch. We've talked about the freezer a lot with Carol Ann's book, because she also really recommends freezing [00:34:00] foods. So I'm just always gonna lean down on the freezer.

Riley: My response to Kerry. Might be surprising to you, but my response is don't,

Roni: Oh

Riley: she says, I always get, or they say, I always get excited about making extra ingredients. Don't, don't make extra ingredients without a plan.

Roni: Ooh, I love it.

Riley: If all of these ingredients, like the beans, the carrots, the eggplant rice, if they did not have a purpose, then it was wasteful.

Like unless, you know, like if even if your plan was, I'm going to eat these four things mixed together for lunch every day, that's a plan. But if you are just getting excited about making extra ingredients to have extra ingredients lying around without a purpose, they don't have a job. They get, they go to waste.

So I would say, look at your meal plan. What do you actually need to prep and only prep that?

Roni: Tip. I like it.

Riley: And then you most likely won't throw away food. Now, you may end up with leftovers, but we're not throwing away food that we just prepped for [00:35:00] fun. Now, don't get me wrong, I like to prep food for fun. I like to prep food, but I just, you know, it needs to have a purpose.

Roni: Well, and I think that there, and maybe it's not necessarily prepping food for fun, but there's an element of like, well, if I prep these vegetables, I'm bound to eat more

Riley: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

yeah. 

Roni: And that doesn't always work out.

Riley: Yeah,

Roni: Our like best laid plans are like good intentions at the beginning of the week.

Those don't always follow us through to Friday.

Riley: totally. Yeah, I mean, I, I mean, I agree, like if I buy a head of celery and carrots, , things along like cucumbers, like I might chop all of that at the beginning of the week. But it not necessarily, like it won't, it's not getting cooked and then, you know, then you're like dealing with like, oh, we gotta cook this for something.

I mean, even fruit, like I'll prep fruit for the whole week knowing that we're gonna have it for breakfast, knowing that we're gonna have, you know, that those veggies and stuff for a snack, maybe with some hummus or dip or something. But they still kind of have a job. So like, I would say just encourage you, like if a food is not going to be used for something, lunches, whatever, don't do it.[00:36:00] 

Roni: Have the vision first.

Riley: Yeah.

Roni: I like it. Okay, Kim says, I try to plan a three course meal, protein, vegetable grain slash starch. What's the be, what's the best way to put it on the plan? Three separate meals or on my spaghetti, do I add salad and french bread? So this is like a tactical plan to eat. I think tactical.

Inside Plan to Eat,

Riley: Yeah. Yeah. 

Roni: I think this is, we talked about menus. I think that one of the ways that we tell customers to do this type of a situation is to create a menu, because while we talked about creating menus for one week, two weeks, one month, two months, you can also create a menu for just a single mealtime.

And so you can put all three of those recipes into one mealtime. You can put your spaghetti and salad and french bread recipes altogether, and then when you wanna plan that, you can just drag that one menu on. And all three recipes are included in it. You also have the option of adding a recipe inside [00:37:00] another recipe.

We don't have a way of like linking recipes so that way they're always planned with each other. But you can create a new header in your recipe, like in your ingredients. So it's like, so it's like you have spaghetti and then you could put like your salad ingredients below it, but you could have like your header of salad so you know which ones were specifically for salad.

Like that's another way to do it. But I would say that I would only do it that way if. There is 100% of the time you plan those together. Like this is a really good way to do it. If you have a, a cake and a frosting and anytime you make that cake, cake, you're making this frosting. 'cause that's the only time that you make those two things, you know?

But maybe with the spaghetti situation, if you're wanting to change it up every once in a while, I probably go the menu route.

Riley: Yeah, I, I actually do this a lot, just with ingredient notes. Um, so like, maybe I'll add the main dish to dinner. Thursday, but then I click on the little plus sign, you know, and then I say, I'm gonna add an ingredient. That [00:38:00] ingredient. If it's an ingredient, it goes to the shopping list. If it is just a note, it doesn't.

So I might add an ingredient, because like I actually make green beans that there's no recipe for in Plan to Eat. I just make them the same way every time. And so I'll write down fresh green beans, like as a side dish. Um, and I know that when I go to make it, I make it this way and it doesn't require a lot of extras, you know?

And so, or like even, you know, I'm thinking about like, oh, we're gonna have people over for dinner, and I'm making the. Mississippi Pot Roast and Roni's bringing a bagged salad. Well, I can add a note that says Roni's bringing Bagged Salad. Um, this allows you to kinda like make a, make a meal more robust without adding these things, but they have per different purposes, right?

It's like the note would be Roni's bringing this, the ingredient's gonna go to my shopping list that lets me know I need to buy it. I think menus is a great tool for this, but like Roni said, unless you're doing it every single time, you might want a little bit more flexibility. , So I would just either drag every recipe.

To dinner on Thursday or use the ingredient notes, ingredient [00:39:00] box ingredients for, those extras and things you wanna add.

Roni: This is not 100% related to this.

Riley: Oh, go ahead.

Roni: We are adding a new, we are updating a feature, well, no, I guess we're adding, we are adding a feature. To the website version of Plan to Eat, and I think it'll be out maybe by the time this podcast goes live, if not very soon after this podcast goes live, which is a search bar on the planner.

So you can search for a recipe and see when you planned it last all you can see all of the times when you planned it. So if you've used Plan day for 10 years, it's gonna show you all 10 years of when you sp planned this spaghetti recipe and you can click on the different days. You can see what side dishes you planned it with, and.

It's a commonly requested feature to have a search bar on the Planner specifically for side dishes and being like, I made this chicken parmesan, but, and I know that we had a really good side dish with it last time, but I don't, was it green beans? Was it broccoli? I don't even remember.

So now you have the option to search so that you can easily find these [00:40:00] things.

Riley: Cool. That's exciting. Thanks for the update. Next up we have a dinner dilemma from Becky and they say I work my day job from nine to four when my three kids are in school. And then my second shift of parenting driving, ah, that's so relatable. Starts I have 30 minutes max to cook dinner and I don't have great cooking skills.

What are your suggestions for me? Thanks.

Roni: Well, I know that we say this like every time that somebody asks for recipe suggestions, but I'm like.

Riley: I know.

Roni: Get on Instagram, get on Google, find creators who create recipes that are low skill. Low time.

Riley: Yeah, I, the amount of Instagram accounts that I can think of that are like, I went to Trader Joe's and I bought these four ingredients and it took me 14 minutes to make dinner. Like there's so many of those. I would say. Crockpots, like she's working her day job from nine to four. I don't know what time her kids go to school.

But putting something in the crockpot, if you, if you, you can get a crockpot [00:41:00] that has a timer that won't start. Like if, you know, I'm thinking there's this lasagna soup recipe. We've talked about this, right? And you said when you made it, it only took like two hours or something

Roni: Yeah, not long. You, it's not, it's not an all day.

Riley: Yeah. And so it, that would be like one of those things where it's like, well, I'd really like to make this, but we don't have the two hours.

Or I don't have time to make it. But you could put all the ingredients in your crockpot. And then say, start at two. You know, something along those lines. And then it's gonna autostart for you. Um, they have, you know, really fancy crockpots now. So crockpot, sheet pan meals. Don't have great cooking skills.

I would say, lean into those things with a lot of those, like pre-made help items, like going to Trader Joe's. I mean, you might not have a Trader Joe's, but your regular grocery store will have things along the same lines. You know, you're gonna get a ravioli that's filled with this and you're gonna get a pasta sauce that's this, and maybe you buy a rotisserie chicken and suddenly you have chicken ravioli and Parmesan, I don't know, whatever, you know.

But just like leaning in a little bit too. Some of these pre-made things may be steamer veggie bags. So you're not doing any of the chopping, you're just throwing it [00:42:00] in the microwave, which I mean, I don't always recommend, but look, if we're running outta time, that's still a vegetable, you know? So doing some of those things, I would say just like leaning in a bit in this busy season to what can I, how can I make the healthiest meal with a little bit littlest bit of time and the most help from the grocery store and go for it.

Roni: Yeah, my suggestion was also gonna be this like semi homemade situation, um, because. I think that that's just gonna, that's the thing that doesn't require as many cooking skills is to, is to do semi homemade things, but it's still a homemade meal. You know, like, I mean, we're kids from the nineties. We, I grew up on Hamburger Helper, you know, and my mom is a good cook.

But there was just a lot of times where she's like, look, I do not have the time and energy to make like a full homemade meal. We're we're having hamburger helper, you know.

Riley: Yeah, I mean, this is another place where those weekend meal prep things would be super helpful. I know we literally just told Kerry, don't make the extra ingredients. But if you do have a plan for those [00:43:00] ingredients, or maybe you have a whole Saturday, maybe Saturday you make breakfast sandwiches, or you make, lasagnas or enchilada, you know those things that can go in the freezer.

And then all you have to do is put it out on the counter while you're at work, and then when you get home, throw it in the oven. It'll be thawed, you're ready to go.

Roni: Yeah. And I know that we have, ans we answered a dinner dilemma quite a while ago where, where part of their problem was is they needed like on the Go foods, right? And so it's like, you could think about that as well as like, do you need to have like burritos? Do you need to have sandwiches do, right?

Do they do, because you're then sh your second shift is a part driver. You know, do you need to like, do your kids need to have food that's like a little more on the go? And a lot of those things are really easy to prep.

Riley: My brain's escaping me, but who is the lady who made everything into a hot pocket?

Roni: Oh, that was not somebody we interviewed. That was just from our customer meal planning tips. I

Riley: Oh

Roni: was either, but yeah.

Riley: Okay. This customer, everything she had left over, everything would go into a hot pocket. We're talking mac and cheese, pot [00:44:00] roast curry, green beans, like everything went into a hot pocket. But I mean. You know, if you are on the go, sometimes you gotta have some handheld food.

Roni: And you could buy a pre-made dough. I know that that customer made her own dough. She also said, she was like, you could do a pizza dough, you could do a bun dough, you could do a pastry. Like she was clearly like skilled in the dough making realm. But you could also buy pre-made dough, like there's like frozen dough in the frozen food section.

And you could make your own that way.

Riley: Yeah. I mean, just because you don't have great cooking skills doesn't, you know, like I would not like, yeah, don't like define yourself that way. You know, like you can still make really great meals with some help and you're still cooking at home, so

Roni: I would say if there's one skill that you would learn, it's just like, learn how to season your food well,

Riley: Yeah. That's

Roni: because I think, because I think it doesn't matter whether it's a pre-made or homemade. If you can season your food well, it's gonna taste good.

Riley: Great point.

Roni: That wraps us up for this [00:45:00] week. We will be back with you in two weeks. And in the meantime, if you found this or any other episode helpful, we would love it if you would share it with a friend or a family member, get the word out about the podcast. Or if you just like me and Riley and you wanna support us, you know you could share a podcast with a friend.

Riley: For it.

Roni: Thanks again for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.