Using a Meal Matrix

As with most aspects of my life, I go through seasons where I am on top of meal planning and seasons where it is a shambles. I do not know why I am unable to maintain any form of regularity or routine but after years of trying to make myself stick to one, I have had to begin to accept that it just isn’t going to happen. If this is the case, I need to reframe how I think about these seasons.

Instead of thinking about myself as either Being On Top Of Things or Letting The Ball Drop, I need to start to identify those times when I am feeling motivated to be organised and use this time to plan for the Other Times, the ones where I forget to get the meat out of the freezer or go grocery shopping, or where I just don’t feel like cooking.

With this in mind, I am spending some time getting my meal-planning resources updated. I use Microsoft Onenote to store my recipes, list of brainless crowdpleasers, and my meal matrix.

The first one is pretty self-explanatory. I have a list of recipes which I know we like (and some new ones to try) along with pictures of the recipe from whatever receipe book or card it has come from. This saves me from having to look the recipes up in the books when I am cooking and it means I can check ingredients when I am out and about as I have Onenote on my phone.

The term brainless crowdpleasers comes from (for me at least) Kendra Adachi. These are meals that the whole family loves without exception and that they will be happy to eat. They are usually pretty straightforward too. A lot of the tension of meal planning for me comes from Austin’s dietary needs and also his fussy tendencies (probably linked to the former) and I find it so disheartening to spend time on making food that is not enthusiastically enjoyed. This list is my first stop when I am meal planning.

Finally, I find using a meal matrix is an easy way to avoid decision fatigue. I go through phases of using this (as explained above!) but it is always great to fall back on when I am struggling to get a plan made. A meal matrix is where we have a similar type of cuisine each day (see above).

For someone who is so disorganised, I sure do have amazing organisational systems!