Why You Should Have A Simple Meal Plan

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It’s so easy these days to get caught by the lure of fancy cooking. Making meals takes up a fair amount of time each day, and most of us like to keep it interesting. However, there are some good reasons to stick to a simple meal plan, despite the temptation to experiment with elaborate recipes.

The Lure of Gourmet Cooking

There are days (or weeks) when menu planning seems to require too much energy, and then you can end up eating the same dishes week after week. Most of the time, I crave more variety and creativity in cooking–and that’s where the problem starts.

Social media is full of glossy photos of mouth-watering meals. Cookbooks have high-quality, full page pictures displayed alongside the recipes. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good advertising, and I am very susceptible to it!

Exotic cuisines generally aren’t my style, and I don’t often try them. But elaborate recipes with fancy ingredients can be pretty tempting, both for the challenge of making them correctly and for the delight in serving (and eating) a fancy dish.

Reasons to Cook Simply

Now, there are several reasons why this is not the best cooking habit. First, to put it plainly, our grocery budget doesn’t accommodate a lot of fancy ingredients. Pantry staples and fresh, whole foods? Yes. But specialty condiments or expensive brands? You won’t find those in my kitchen.

Also, who wants to run to the grocery store every other day because you wanted to make a meal that requires ingredients you don’t usually stock? Not me!

The other negative effects aren’t quite as easy to see at first glance–but they are just as important. These other costs are time and peace of mind. They go hand in hand, because the more time I spend cooking unfamiliar or elaborate recipes, the more stressed I get.

This can be magnified when you’re cooking for a special occasion or a large group of people. The costs of time and mental energy can really add up to make you exhausted and sick of cooking.

Lessons Learned

A few weeks ago, I had found a recipe that looked exciting, and I really wanted to try it. I only had to buy one “special” ingredient, and that’s only because my cilantro died. So it wasn’t a pricey meal, but I could tell it would be labor-intensive.

Add to that the fact that it happened to be my worst day of a nasty cold, and then someone decided it was a good day to clean the house from top to bottom…

Cooking and cleaning all day with a cold made me grumpy (have you tried chopping onions when your eyes are already watery?), and by suppertime, I just wanted to go to bed.

The meal wasn’t anything to write home about, either. I was hoping that it would be amazing and we would end the day on a high note, but instead it just left me wondering why I spent all that time and effort on it.

I could have had a much more peaceful and enjoyable day if I hadn’t tried to cook such an elaborate meal.

So what’s the solution? Never cook fancy meals? Stick to rice and beans for the rest of your life? I don’t think so. Rather, I try to set a simple meal plan and stick to it most of the time, while allowing room for more elaborate meals on special occasions. It’s part of living an organized and simple life.

How A Simple Meal Plan Can Decrease Stress

But doesn’t meal planning take lots of time and complicate your life? you may wonder. It doesn’t have to.

Now, if you sit down with ten cookbooks and a few Pinterest boards full of recipes, then try to choose a week’s worth of meals from that huge selection, it’s going to be overwhelming. It can take hours and leave you feeling frustrated.

I know because that’s one of the methods I tried when I was learning how to plan meals.

But if you go about it with a more reasonable strategy, meal planning can save a lot of time you would have spent staring into the fridge wondering what to cook for dinner.

When you have your meals planned in advance, you don’t have the daily stress of coming up with a meal and hoping you have all the ingredients.

You can just glance at your meal plan in the morning to see if there’s anything to make ahead. If not, you don’t even have to think about dinner until it’s time to start cooking!

This gets cooking out of your head, eliminating stress and giving you time to think about other things.

What is a Simple Meal Plan?

It doesn’t mean you have to eat the same meals over and over again, or only eat desserts on holidays. Not at all. The beauty of a simple meal plan is that you can intentionally schedule a variety of simple recipes so you’re not always stuck making the same four or five meals!

By simple meals, I mean those which you can prepare from ingredients you normally keep on hand, and which don’t involve many different dishes.

Typically for us, this would be a casserole, soup, or one pot meal, along with a vegetable and/or bread. There’s a lot of room for creativity within that framework, so I don’t feel cramped.

Remember that the individual dishes should also be fairly simple- at least as a whole. If each part of the meal takes you two hours to prepare, I wouldn’t call that a simple meal.

When I say that, I’m talking about hands-on cooking time. Of course baking bread or roasting a chicken takes hours, but most of that time you aren’t actually working on it.

Slow food is fine. (It’s ideal in my book!) Elaborate cooking isn’t bad, but for the sake of simplicity, it’s best saved for special occasions.

Meals to Mark the Days

If you eat exotic or fancy meals all the time, how do you mark the meaningful days of the year? Growing up in a tradition of fasting and feasting at different times during the year, I have always seen food as an important way to commemorate holidays, birthdays, and other special occasions.

Preparing special meals on these days is a simple way to make them special, and it doesn’t involve storing bulky decorations or spending a lot of money.

But again, it only seems special in contrast to simpler meals on ordinary days. So my goal in creating a simple meal plan is really to plan special meals on special days, and serve simpler fare the rest of the time.

And when I talk about saving special meals for special days, those come fairly often in our house. Of course big holidays like Christmas and Easter deserve elaborate meals. On birthdays, we let the birthday boy or girl choose the meal, and celebrate with cake and ice cream.

But we also celebrate special feast days in the liturgical calendar: both solemnities (the highest ranking feast), and those saints’ days that have a particular significance to us.

Now, I don’t make huge meals on these days, but they are a good excuse to make dessert or have some food associated with the saint, like Irish food on St. Patrick’s day.

Flexibility is Key

A simple meal plan is a great tool for streamlining your cooking–if you use it that way. On the other hand, if you create a meal plan and then think you absolutely need to stick to the plan, it could end up complicating your life.

Remember my cooking fail example above? The more reasonable option would have been to cut myself some slack that day both for being sick and for deep cleaning the house. I should have substituted an easy meal for the complicated one I had planned.

Keep this in mind when building your simple meal plan. If you plan a week’s or even a month’s worth of meals at a time, remember it’s completely acceptable to adjust the plan as you go.

If a special day comes up and you just don’t have the time or energy to make an elaborate meal, don’t beat yourself up over it. There are much more important things in life!

Balancing Simple with Special

One of my favorite parts about having a simple meal plan is that special days no longer come up unexpectedly and leave me scrambling for a last-minute dessert. I now plan ahead for birthdays and holidays, so I’m sure to have all the ingredients I need.

In my ideal world, the everyday fare in our simple meal plan would be punctuated by bigger Sunday dinners and a few saints’ days each month, plus birthdays and big holidays with their own special meals.

I’m not quite organized enough to do all of this yet, but it’s getting there. And I’m okay with celebrating random days once in a while because I found a recipe I just had to try!

To learn how to set up your first meal plan, read this article on Easing into Meal Planning.

For more on simple living, check out these articles on living in a small space and simplifying road trips with a toddler.