Put meal time on autopilot
For busy households, preparing meals can seem like a never-ending chore. Putting much of the related effort on ‘autopilot’ can make life easier and reduce the temptation to order take-out.
The Facts
- Make meal planning a routine
- Put together a list of favourite meals
- Reduce decision fatigue with weekly menus
- Speed up grocery shopping
Life can get extremely busy. Fitting meal prep into hectic days may sometimes seem impossible. Skipping breakfast or picking up something on the way to work, buying lunch, and ordering take-out for dinner all solve the problem in the short term. In the long term, these coping strategies are detrimental to many grocery budgets.
Hence the idea of putting meal prep on ‘autopilot’ by removing as many daily decisions as possible and automating several of the steps required to prepare food at home.
Strategies to automate mealtime:
- Routine: Make meal planning a weekly routine. Rather than making decisions daily, set aside a regular time for meal planning once a week.
- Favourite meals: Busy weeks are not the time to try out new recipes. Pick a small number of reliable, go-to breakfast, lunch, and dinner options and cycle through these. Adjust the selection based on the seasons. Lighter meals when it’s warm, heartier ones when it’s cold.
- Pre-plan weekly menus: Map out meals in advance to eliminate scrambling for ideas. Keep breakfast as simple as possible. Put dinner favourites on a rotation that repeats every week, or every two weeks. Plan lunches around dinner leftovers or ingredients that can be prepped in advance.
- Automate grocery shopping: Create a written shopping list from the meal plan, and shop with this list in hand, for a quick in-and-out trip to the store. Or order the groceries in, if that’s in the budget.
- Possibly use an automated tracking app: Apps like 'Eat This Much' generate custom meal plans and automated grocery lists. Some apps have features that are free to use, while other features may require a subscription.
Putting meal times on autopilot is a process. For it to become a routine, it's best to start small and build from there. Collecting favourite meal ideas in a binder might be a helpful first step to ease into meal planning.