#126: Meal Planning for Busy Weeks and Unpredictable Schedules

This week, we're helping you handle crazy schedules and a lack of time to plan and cook. Evenings get packed with kids’ activities, meetings, and errands. Schedules can change at the last minute, making it hard to cook consistently, prep ahead, or stick to a plan. If you find you're often getting takeout, skipping meals, or wasting groceries, this episode is for you!

Let's dive into some tactics to help you save time, get people fed, and stick to your meal plan. Enjoy!

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Transcript

unpredictable schedules

[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. 

RIley: Welcome to the Plan to Eat Podcast. We're back and we're gonna continue our series on how to get started on the right path of planning in 2026. Today we're talking about lack of time and unpredictable schedules, which I personally feel like affects every single person on the planet.

Because whether you have kids that you're running around to activities, you have a job, you're running around to things outside of work. 'cause everyone has extracurriculars. Errands, friends, you know, doing things in your life. Everyone does things and schedules changed last minute, which makes it so hard to cook consistently, prep ahead and stick to a plan, which ultimately in my own life leads to takeout, um, leftovers skipped meals and wasted groceries, which is my [00:01:00] very least favorite of all of these things.

Roni: We hate, we hate wasted groceries.

RIley: hate it.

Roni: It's like a multi-pronged hate, you know? Like I hate that I'm. It like makes me feel sad that I'm throwing things in the trash. Like I almost like anthropomorphize my food and I'm like, oh, poor lettuce. I didn't eat you.

RIley: yes, I do the same thing.

Roni: And then, and then of course there's like the budget aspect where it's just like, well gee, dang it, I spent money on, I spent a good money on this thing. And now it's just going in the trash can. Yeah, it's the worst. Wasting food is the worst.

RIley: Yeah. I especially hate it when I had really big plans for whatever it is.

Roni: Yeah, there's like a kind of a letdown where you're like, I was really looking forward to making that recipe, and now these tomatoes are like disgusting.

RIley: Mm-hmm.

I get really excited about beautiful produce, particularly in the summer, and I feel like that's what I throw away the most often. So many other things can be frozen, um, so much more easily than produce can be. But in the [00:02:00] summer I'm like, I just get so inspired by these heirloom tomatoes. There's this beautiful bunch of kale and it's devastating to throw it away.

Roni: Yeah, well, and freezing produce, like obviously we know that you can freeze produce, but you don't use it in the same form. Once it's frozen, usually it's gotta go into something, a casserole or a soup, or a stew or a something out. You can't use it in the same fresh way that you were gonna use it potentially in the first place.

RIley: Yep. 

Roni: So I think today's episode is gonna be a lot of tactical ideas, a lot of tips around how to work around this idea of lack of time, unpredictable schedules. This is. Not so much of a reframing, like last week, I think last episode was a little bit more of a let's reframe what being unmotivated to plan or to cook dinner looks like.

And this week it's just a little more like, look, we all sometimes struggle with time [00:03:00] management. We have unpredictable schedules. Let's figure out some tactical ways that we can fix the situation.

RIley: I love, I love this, and I'm sitting over here grinning because I saw this. Really funny reel on Instagram and it was this woman and she was like strapping on her weighted vest. And she's like, this generation of moms is a different generation of moms. Like, we're gonna go on a walk in our weighted vest, or we're gonna go walk on the treadmill in our weighted vest.

Or you know, all the, it's like, it's like suddenly we're all tactical. And it's like, no, I didn't join the Navy Seals. I'm just going on a walk. You know? and that's how this feels to me right now. I'm like, okay, we got tactical steps. I'm like, but that's right for this generation of moms. 'cause, 'cause we're strapped on our weighted vest in every area of our life, including meal planning.

Roni: Oh, amazing. Okay, so my first tip related to lacking time unpredictable schedules is create your own list of ideas around if Y [00:04:00] happens, then we do x. Okay. I didn't mean to like make this algebraic, but you know, like replace y and X with things, right? So like if soccer practice runs late, we're gonna do takeout for dinner.

If I have a late meeting at work, then we will have a 15 minute meal, if I'm completely exhausted at the end of the day, then we're just gonna eat frozen pizza. I think that like the idea of. Already Having the ideas, already having your, your quote unquote worst case scenario figured out makes this a lot easier to combat.

Instead of every single time it is takeout or we throw the stuff in the trash or a. You know, we're running through McDonald's, drive-through again. There's nothing wrong with the drive-through or getting takeout, but I just feel like a lot of the time we don't wanna do that every single night of the week.

And so knowing the alternatives before that ever happens is the, the best way to combat the [00:05:00] situation.

RIley: Yeah, and you and I talk about this a lot and um, but to apply it to this specific scenario, you and I both meal plan in a way that incorporates. Easy meals into our meal plan every week because we know things are gonna come up and if things don't come up and we've got an easy meal on the meal planner, sweet,

Roni: Yeah.

RIley: We still will eat it, you know?

But, so yeah, so I'm looking at my meal plan and I'm thinking, okay, I've got, you know, lasagna this night. Well, that's not easy. But I do have breakfast burritos for dinner, and yes, you can eat those for dinner, and that would be something that would be a fill in on one of those nights. Grab and go take 'em with you.

Something along those lines. But it really allows you to like. Have that kind of pre-built into your plan for these nights when you don't know what's gonna happen. Now a lot of those situations you just ran through are things where you knew you were gonna have soccer practice or you knew you were gonna have a meeting.

But nights where you don't, where you're exhausted, you don't know when those are gonna happen, you know? And again, there's nothing wrong with takeout and planning. Takeout is also a part of your meal plan. [00:06:00] That's great. Uh, but you know, basically adding in those 15 minute meals or grab and go kind of meals that you have pre-made, prepped, whatever. It's just a really great way to meal plan every week.

Roni: Absolutely. Yep. Yeah, and I mean, this is along the same lines. What you're talking about is, like we talk about all the time, is to plan less on your meal plan. So. Basically the way that I meal plan, which I think can be helpful for a lot of people who have, uh, more unpredictable schedules is I plan typically four dinners every week, and I put all four dinners at the beginning of the week.

I put 'em all on Monday night. And then I go grocery shopping, and I put my shopping list as the date range of Monday, right? Because it has all of the recipes on it. And so I'm just, just able to make my grocery list from that day. And then as the week unfolds, I drag and drop the recipes onto the days that the recipes get made.

And so it's like by the end of the week, I'm only left with, you know, one or two less recipes left on [00:07:00] Monday that can be dragged down into the week. But it's really helpful. If you're somebody who feels like, well, I can't be rigid with my planning, because we never know exactly what's happening. So I can't plan lasagna on Wednesday because I don't know what Wednesday is gonna look like.

Right? And so it's like, well, lasagna is just somewhere in your week. Lasagna could happen on Wednesday, it could happen on Saturday. And uh, I think that's a really helpful thing when you don't exactly know how things are gonna pan out in your week. On the flip side, I still think planning minimally is a great idea, if your problem isn't necessarily unpredictable schedule, but it's just general lack of time, like you have a very busy schedule that is like booked back to back to back, that's probably a time when you do need to be very particular about what is going on your meal plan on which days.

So that way you do have. A 15 minute recipe or an air fryer recipe, or, you know, taking a frozen recipe out of the freezer on a certain night of the week, like making sure that, that you [00:08:00] have planned ahead for those nights where you do have very little amount of time is a really helpful thing to do.

RIley: Yes. To all of that. And that is typically how I meal plan. I don't put it all on one day like you do, but I certainly look at, I plan four dinners and then I incorporate things like. A super easy meal, or I incorporate eating out, or I incorporate like a leftovers night or like a fridge clean out.

We often eat leftovers for lunches, but inevitably there's things that don't get eaten and they need to be eaten, you know? Another thing that I do that can be another like tactical. A step that someone can do, and we've talked about this before, um, is planning pantry meals and I mean that you've got all the ingredients in your pantry and or freezer or both.

That can be worked into a meal plan so that you know that you have something to eat at home. But it won't go bad if it gets skipped, you know, like I've got this easy thing that can come together. These live in my pantry for the night when I just need to throw something in the crockpot. Crockpot [00:09:00] meals are awesome pantry meals because so many things can be canned.

Simple things can be frozen, pasta along those lines. You just dump it all into a crock pot and you're done. And so I recommend coming up with a pantry meal that your family really likes, maybe two of them, and then you just got them for the nights and where you just don't know what you were gonna have and you have something, um, but then you're not going out to eat and spending more money.

You're not wasting a whole meal because it was ingredients that were gonna go bad.

Roni: And then when you eat that pantry meal, make sure you plan it for your next week in plan to eat, even if you don't plan to eat it the next week. But that way you remember to buy the ingredients so that you're stocked up again.

RIley: Yeah. And you can get creative with those. It doesn't have to be the same pantry meal every week. I kind of have like a rotation of them and. Then it just keeps things interesting, but it's there. And like even breakfast can kind of be a pantry meal. I almost always have eggs. I almost always have, if you know pan pancakes or waffles, something or other, I've got something in the freezer, I could thaw [00:10:00] out fruit.

And that meal comes together really fast and it's super simple.

Roni: Yeah. So give us a couple ideas of some of your, some of your pantry recipes in case listeners are thinking, what, what would that be? Mm-hmm.

RIley: Mm-hmm. Um, so I almost always have ingredients for this, like pasta sausage. S kind of like a stir fry. It's like a one pot meal. Um, and it is pasta and sausage, like kielbasa, smoked sausage, something along those lines. I've used a variety of them, kind of whatever I had in my freezer. Broccoli, which can be frozen broccoli or fresh broccoli.

And then rotel tomatoes. And some kind of salad dressing. So like you could use a Caesar dressing, give a little tang. You could use an Italian dressing balsamic. You could even use something like a packet of like ranch mix. Um, just like add some oil to it, kind of create it into that sauce, put it over the whole thing.

Uh, another one that I really like is white chicken chili, which I feel like I'm a broken record, but that one [00:11:00] is a pantry staple meal, if there ever was one. Stir fry. I almost always have rice or some kind of noodle, like some kind of rice noodle in my pantry. And so just pulling out, I, it's very easy to make a peanut sauce.

Uh, it's very easy and I usually have some kind of garlic and ginger and cilantro limes. I've got something in that realm. So I'll make my own sauce. I potentially have a jar of sauce, so stir fry veggie, a frozen bag, a noodle, and a sauce that's a meal, and it comes together so easy.

Roni: That's great. I think a recipe that I referenced last time is we ma make beans on

RIley: Yes. Yeah.

Roni: that is super easy. It's just cans of beans if you wanna have meat in it. I usually have, Italian, some type of Italian sausage around. And then, you know, just some, some bread, it doesn't have to be fancy bread, it can literally be sandwich bread that you toast.

Uh, I also have like a homemade hamburger helper recipe that I always have the things on hand for. Trying to think, oh, like a [00:12:00] taco pie. I pretty much always have the things now that's not necessarily pantry specific because you do need like either milk or half and half and eggs, and cheese, right?

Like you do need some like perishable items. But for me that's definitely like an on-hand thing 'cause we always have those staples. Unless it's been an extremely long time since I've been to the grocery store.

RIley: I, uh, call like sandwich night at my house. Sometimes I just call it fancy sandwiches. And so, so it's sandwich stuff, which we always have because sandwiches are a big lunch thing around here. Um. Then I just make sure that I have, oh, oh, I've got lettuce. Okay, cool. Let's put lettuce on this, or a tomato, or, or I've got horse radish.

Let's put some horse radish on this instead of just mayonnaise or whatever. And then I usually toast the bread, melt the cheese, kind of elevate the sandwich to try to make it like a little more exciting. And so we have fancy sandwich nights sometimes. Um. Honestly, we almost always have stuff for spaghetti, whether or not I have a [00:13:00] meat protein to go in, that I always have like the pasta noodles.

I always have like a jar of sauce, canned tomato, some other things to kind of spice it up. And so sometimes what I'll do with that is like, I've literally made this with air fryer, chicken fingers,

Roni: Oh yeah.

RIley: like. Like a marinara and chicken, like par chicken Parmesan kind of

Roni: there you

RIley: Obviously it's a little bit, you know, we're winging it, but at the same time, nobody's complaining about that, usually in my house.

So,

Roni: Sometimes the winging it meals are like my husband's favorite

RIley: yeah, like, write this down. We liked this.

Roni: He's like, oh, we get to eat like basically chicken nuggets for dinner. Great.

RIley: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't complain about a Caesar salad with chicken nuggets. 'cause I think that's just like a really delicious,

Roni: love, I love Caesar salad, man. I could eat that every night. I think Ramen is another one. I

RIley: Mm-hmm.

Roni: have packets of ramen noodles on hand, and for me, ramen is like a kitchen sink, sort of a soup. You know, like [00:14:00] any leftover vegetable, I feel like almost any vegetable you could have, could go well in ramen.

And like, even if it's just like, like sometimes we just have ramen. It just has like carrots. That has our vegetable that's in the ramen. But also like frozen vegetables work super well in something like ramen. So your ramen is one that we always have stuff for.

RIley: I often plan ramen when I've used mushrooms in something else because I inevitably have mushrooms leftover and I really like adding mushrooms to my ramen. Kinda like gives that some more umami flavor to it. Um, so I always do that after I have a rush recipe with mushrooms when I know I'm gonna have leftovers 'cause I don't use those in a ton of things.

I thought of another one and it just like kind of came and left my brain. Shoot. Okay, nevermind. We just gave people a ton of ideas.

Roni: Yeah, I think some good ones. Okay. Another tip, and this actually comes directly from one of the dinner dilemmas that we answered. It which is like, only prep what you know you're going to use that week.

Don't aspirationally prep for your life and hope that you like eat [00:15:00] more vegetables or protein or fiber or something like that. Because that's a lot of times where food waste happens is if you're prepping food that's outside of the recipes that you have planned for the week. Now you might like to prep things like carrot sticks and celery sticks as like snacks or something.

And I'm not talking about that necessarily. I'm talking about just like some over the top meal prep where you're like, we bought a butternut squash and a cabbage and a this and a that, and I chopped it all up and they're all in separate containers and we're going to use them this week. But you don't actually have a recipe that calls for butternut squash or whatever.

So, so I think it's just like, that's like a bit of a, a time waster. Not only is it food waster, right, but that's a time waster. And if your time is a precious commodity in your life, then you don't need to be spending time doing that. Right.

RIley: Same thing is like if you prep it and actually like go ahead and cook it, you know, like I'm gonna batch prep all this rice or, or this quinoa or all these roasted veggies or I'm gonna make a sauce today to go on everything I might eat this [00:16:00] week. If it's in a might eat it category, don't prep it

Roni: right. Or put it in the freezer, prep it and put it in the freezer, and you'll maybe eat it sometime in the next month.

RIley: yeah. But I agree with you. Aspirational prep, like we ran into this in the dinner, Lili dinner dilemmas a couple of times where people were like, I'm just throwing away so much food. It's like, well, if you didn't have a use for it, when you prepped it, it's unfortunate, but like. You're probably not gonna get around to it.

ESP. And you know, I know people who batch prep their lunches or dinners every single Saturday and Sunday. And like they know I'm gonna have a breakfast burrito every morning. I'm gonna have this quinoa salad and grilled chicken every day for lunch. And then dinner I cook every night. And like, but lunches and breakfast are prepped and those people are cooking and eating everything they cook and eat.

You know, like they're actually cooking and they're actually eating the things they cooked.

Roni: They don't really give themselves another option. They're like, this is lunch for the week, the end,

RIley: Yes, exactly. So I think it's important to have a plan for the things that you're buying and the things that you're prepping.

Roni: right? Yeah. [00:17:00] 'cause we're not against batch cooking and freezing recipes. That's actually another idea that we have is to. Batch cook and then freeze recipes so that way you can pull them out of the freezer on nights when things are a little crazy. And the nice thing about this is that if you don't get to them in your week, they can just stay in the freezer and it's no harm, no foul.

And. So in plan to eat, you can do this with the freezer feature. You can batch cook recipes and then you can add them to your freezer in plan to eat. You can say how many meals you have and how many servings each meal has, so that way you have a way of keeping track of what you actually have in your freezer.

Or we have the leftovers feature, which goes more with the idea that Riley just talked about like, I made my lunch for the whole week. So you could put that recipe, you know, on Sunday and then you could create a bunch of leftover notes from that recipe and drag 'em onto the different lunches of your week.

The difference between, I think a, some plate, something that gets a little confusing if you use plan to eat is like, [00:18:00] when would I use the freezer and when would I use leftovers? And the freezer is for that like batch cooking. I actually freezed it. It went in the freezer. Whereas the leftovers is like, I cooked it and it's still in the refrigerator and we're gonna get to it.

A couple different times this week, and then maybe at the end you could put it in the freezer if you ended up with a few more extra servings, um, that you didn't get to after a couple days. But that's just sort of the difference there. If you're a plan to eat user and you've been wondering like, when would I use the freezer?

I don't know.

RIley: Yeah, freezing things that I cook is actually a place where I have gotten into a really good rhythm, like if I make a batch of enchiladas. My family is not going to eat 50 enchiladas in one night. You know, like, but somehow that's how many, that's how much ingredients I prepped, you know, to go and, and so I often keep foil pans at my house because there are gonna be nights where I didn't even know it was gonna be this much or. Oh man, this [00:19:00] soup made a way more than I was expecting, or, okay, these people weren't here for dinner tonight. I guess we'll pivot and I'll freeze this. I keep containers that can easily go in my freezer.

Ready. Um, so that when I have those nights where I could freeze something, I don't always plan for it. It's often when I realize, okay, this made a lot more than I thought it was going to, or we didn't eat as much of it as I was expecting, or whatever. Fill in the reason why. And so I'll, I'll end up making a dinner.

We eat and I'll freeze a portion of it also. And this is a place where I, I, it's just such a good rhythm at my house and it, it genuinely is such a lifesaver.

Roni: Yeah.

RIley: I love it.

Roni: Yeah, it's a, it's not, I'm not necessarily in the habit of it in the same way that you are, particularly because if we have a recipe that makes leftovers, enchiladas are the same way for us. If I make enchiladas, it's two full nine by 13 pan. I don't know how that happens, but it happens every single time.

RIley: And I'm always regretting like, did I just [00:20:00] underfill the first 10? Like where did it

Roni: Yeah. I'm like, oh, those ones are gonna be not as great. Yeah.

RIley: Yeah.

Roni: Yeah, they're gonna be wimpy enchiladas, but I just basically forced my husband, like, we are eating only enchiladas this week. The rest of the, the rest of the food that I bought it is gonna go into the freezer or, you know, something like, I basically just force us to eat it, when really I should probably freeze things.

RIley: It. I mean, it saves me, 'cause then there's those nights like we're literally talking about right now where I'm unmotivated or I'm really tired or. Uh, whoops. It's, I didn't plan anything for tonight. What was I thinking?

Roni: yeah. Or the

RIley: did I think we were

Roni: been made yet. I was supposed to make it yesterday.

RIley: Yes, or honestly, there are a lot of weeks where I'm like, we have spent too much money on groceries.

We are taking a hiatus from the grocery store. Good luck with what you got here and. Inevitably, I've got something in the freezer that's a pre-made dinner that I made a month ago, and it's awesome. And so it really does fill in the gaps. Like I'm not making freezer meals [00:21:00] because I am expecting that I'm gonna need them.

I'm making them because I know I will love having them later, you know? And so yeah, so I love this feature. I love this option. Highly encourage this. And again, it is actually a lifesaver and a money saver in the future.

Roni: Yeah.

RIley: Another place where this could be a really tactical, helpful thing for people who are having crazy nights, is crockpot and slow cooker recipes. These are my slow cooker, could live on my counter. I use it quite a bit. And I don't just use it for soups and stews and things like that, but you can make slow cook grill lasagna. You can make pulled pork, you can make pot roast. You know, like 150 things you can make in the crockpot zpa ana, I make in the crockpot sometimes.

Now that's a soup, but at the same time, it's not one traditionally cooked in a crockpot, I feel like. But if I've got a busy day, I'll throw it all in there. It's all cooked by the time I get home.

Roni: Oh man. And there are so many recipes on the internet that are more than, yeah, just like soups or roast, you [00:22:00] know, that kind of thing. Like people are making their like chicken and rice and broccoli and, and like things like Parmesan chicken, all sorts of stuff. With the, the slow cooker or the crockpot. And one thing that I'll say is that I know that an argument against this is some people are like, okay, well I'm gone from my house for like 12 hours because like, we gotta drop the kids off to school.

So we gotta leave at seven o'clock and after practice and everything, we're not home until 7:00 PM And in that case, I would say invest in a crockpot that has like an auto shutoff feature. So it cooks the thing on low or whatever for eight hours and then it just automatically shuts off. So that way it doesn't go to like a warm setting or anything else.

It just shuts itself off. So that way you don't have to worry about your food getting overcooked or just the thing like burning your food at the bottom or something. You just get the auto off. You get the ones that have the auto off feature, and then a lot of times they have like a reheat feature too, where it'll reheat the thing in the crock pot in like 15 minutes.

RIley: Yeah, [00:23:00] I, I recently had my crockpot died and so I had to get a new one and I bought one with the timer feature, and it really is incredible. You can set it to start later in the day. You can, it'll turn off on its own. Everything Roni just said, there's a lot of meals you can make in the crockpot that are.

Literally one pot meals. Um, you can put chicken, thighs, rice, carrots, peas, onions, like you got a chicken and rice dish. You can do the same thing with potatoes and green beans. The whole thing's cooked when you get home. You could do like a honey garlic chicken with rice and veggies all in the crockpot.

You can do rice in the crockpot with your chicken, and it's literally all cooked when you get home. That can be like a Greek theme, that could be a Mexican theme that could be. Teriyaki chicken and veggies and rice, like you could do a lot of these different kinds of things. Uh, Hawaiian, that's another whole nother flavor profile that works great.

Meatballs, work great, like chickpea and sweet potato curry. Um.

Roni: Totally.

RIley: I mean, I just feel like there really are endless options. So it's worth checking [00:24:00] out just a little quick Google search. What can I make in the crockpot that's not a soup, or what's a one pot meal for my crock pot? Because especially if you're just like, nah, crock Potts, eh, you know, like there's a lot of people who aren't into it.

There's a lot more you can do with a crock pot than just like stews and soups and roasts. So

Roni: And some people swear by the like dump dinners,

RIley: yeah, they do.

Roni: know? And so like the idea behind that, and this is great if you have just like minimal time for food prep. So like, say you got 30 minutes on a Saturday, well, you get like five Ziploc bags out and you basically, like, you dump all the ingredients into each five of the bags.

And so. Each one. You got five bags of chicken, teriyaki. They all have the same stuff. And then, you know when Tuesday comes around, you just pull that out of your freezer, dump it in your crockpot, turn it on. By the time you get home from work, it's delicious.

RIley: I think dump dinners are a great idea for anyone preparing for surgery or having a baby because. Yes. Freezer meals like we've already been talking about, [00:25:00] those are awesome. But also just the idea of like, it's literally in a bag. You did it beforehand and then it cooks the same day. You're going to eat it sometimes.

Sometimes that like freshness is very welcome in those situations and I feel like, so at dump dinners, I feel like should be on your rotation if you are planning for surgery, prepping for someone who like needs a little help in the kitchen. Uh, or if you're going to have a baby and you like, are planning for that, I feel like that is,

Roni: Yeah, they're just so low effort and you can get, I mean, you could get like a dozen of 'em made in a, in like an hour probably.

RIley: Yeah. I feel like that's a, it's like a for, oh, it's a win right there.

Roni: Yeah, I agree. So if you, again, are a plant eat user, one of the features that we recommend using is the menus feature to help create simple menus that you can just get your meal planning done in seconds. So the menus feature allows you to save a meal plan so that you can reuse it again in the future.

Whether it's a meal plan that you already have [00:26:00] used in the past, and you just go back into your meal plan and you say like, oh yeah, that was a winner. And then you can save those dates as a new menu. Or if you're feeling like a creative genius, you can just go into the menu editor and create a meal plan with really simple meals.

That's gonna be a huge time saver because I think not only do we come across times where we're lacking time to make the food, but even before that happens, you can feel like you're lacking time to even make your meal plan. Or it feels like too mentally exhausting. 'cause you're like, we have too many things going on.

I can't spend 30 minutes right now figuring out what's gonna go on the meal plan. So if you have a couple of menus already created. It just makes it really easy to put those on the planner, and then of course, you can adjust as needed if you decide that a couple of the recipes don't work for you that week, but you can literally, it takes you three seconds to plan the menu.

RIley: I know someone who's a teacher and she does not use plan to eat, but she posted about this, like right after like the winter break was over for students in school and she had [00:27:00] basically printed calendars. She had spent time going in and writing down what they were gonna have for dinner, every single weeknight for the entirety of the school year, like for the spring semester.

And I, I don't know if it went further. It could have been 12, I don't think it was 12. I think it was just for the school year. She's a teacher and I thought like that is. Brilliant because that is something we tell people that they could do in Plan to Eat. The, the calendar in Plantee goes on endlessly. There is no end, you know, and so if you wanted, you could go through and you could create menus and like drag and drop them, like alternating on the calendar.

You could also go through and just literally meal plan for the next five months if you wanted to. I do recommend creating menus because that does allow you to very simply drag and drop them onto the planner. And I think saving them is always worthwhile because it's just, it makes it easier, I think, to use them in the long run.

I think the benefit to using a tool like Plan Eat, I, I commend this teacher for doing this because it probably saves her life, you [00:28:00] know? 'cause she's a busy teacher, busy mom, you

Roni: Yeah. And if your planning style is that like manual style of planning, that takes a long time every

RIley: It does take a long time. Yeah. I think that the thing I would say is like, use a tool like Plante because. It creates a shopping list for you, and so it takes even more of that burden off of you. You create the menus, the meal plans made, then the shopping list is made. Then all you have to do is.

Literally go to the grocery store with your phone, which you would have at any whim of time. You know, like, I guess I can pop in here and get my groceries. Or if you get them delivered, all you do is click deliver groceries inside the app and suddenly you have groceries at your house. And like the effort was so low.

And so that's why I would, I would just like insist that somebody use something like Plan to eat with that kind of method because you just did so much work. Let me make it even easier for you without. Lit. Literally with zero more effort because the meal plan was made with recipes. All those ingredients are on your shopping list merged together.

[00:29:00] Perfectly organized. It's just, it's like just that next level in planning.

Roni: Yeah. Yep. I love it.

Okay. So I think our, one of our, some of our final tactical tips as related to, if part of your issue is that you're on the go a lot. I think we encountered this with the dinner dilemmas, people talking about kids sports and afterschool activities and stuff. So if you're on the go a lot.

I think prepping these handheld recipes, like spending some time on the weekend and making like burritos or sandwiches or wraps or onigiri, which are like filled rice falls. Making those things so that way your kids have something to be like eating when you're transporting them to and from places. Uh, so that way they're not just like in the car and you're like, okay, fine.

We'll stop at Arby's 'cause it's the only thing that's in between here and soccer practice. So, you know, just because the majority of the time your homemade foods are gonna be a little more healthy and it's definitely gonna be [00:30:00] more budget friendly because you're buying all of these things in bulk together at the grocery store instead of individual times through the drive through multiple times a week.

oh, and then also you're able to batch prep these things and keep 'em in the freezer, and then makes a perfect transition into like they can go into a cooler in your car or something. Particularly if you're like, okay, I'm going straight from work to picking the kids up and then we're going to practice like first thing in the morning, you just put 'em in a cooler in your car and then they'll be thawed by the time after school comes.

RIley: Mm-hmm. Yeah, those are super helpful. I, I always think back to that woman who made everything into Pop-Tarts. Sure.

Roni: Oh yeah. To like hand

RIley: poptarts hand pies. Yes, yes, yes. Like mac and cheese into a hand

Roni: Mm-hmm.

RIley: curry into a hand pie like this. That woman has this like, handled the handheld food. She's got it on

Roni: handheld. Yeah.

RIley: Yeah.

This is something that I really don't do a ton of. I do breakfast items this way, but I don't do a ton of other things [00:31:00] this way. Uh, in a prep stand, like in a prep way. Um, but it's a place I could get better.

Roni: Yeah. I'll be honest, I. If my life was really crazy busy, I would probably do this more because I do find a lot of benefit from being able to just like grab something out of the freezer and like, I'm even thinking like my husband, he takes his lunch to work every day. It's really nice when he can just like grab a burrito out of the freezer or something instead of like having to prepare lunch before he goes to work, you know?

RIley: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can even, I've seen these little like presses where you could make your own, um, Uncrustable,

Roni: Oh yeah,

RIley: unfortunately, I think that they waste too much bread, and that's my, like, hesitation on them. However, it's also another thing that you could batch prep and you could make them the way your children or your husband likes them.

Roni: That's true. I like that. Yep.

RIley: Note I left me off the list. I'm not a big uncrustable eater, but.

I don't [00:32:00] know if you're not somebody who likes to meal prep, but you want to, you have some time on the weekend that you don't have during the week, I often will batch prep things like, like I will chop all the veggies for a recipe on my meal plan, or I will make, an aioli or a sauce. That I, that I know I'm going to use, but then I don't have to make it in the middle of that food prep time.

And so I, I guess I just like finding those like marginal moments and being like, oh, I've got like half an hour. I could go make X, Y, or z.

Roni: Mm-hmm.

RIley: Then it's done. I, I actually did that this morning. I had a little bit of time and I made, I made breakfast casserole. I made one for tomorrow and I froze two for the future.

And so it was just like I had the extra time. I went ahead and did it. Now that is meal prepping and that's what I was not really talking about. Like I was more talking about like making a sauce or something along those lines. But just like taking that extra time [00:33:00] and utilizing it, it's that future self will.

Thank you for this later. My kitchen wasn't a mess. I didn't have to make it a mess, but yet I had the time to do it and I knew that the rest of my day was gonna be crazy and that tomorrow was gonna be crazy. So like, go ahead and get this thing done while I have the extra time and trying to, I dunno, utilize my downtime in a better way.

I think, I think that's something that I try to do almost every day, whether that's making a, like a protein ball kind of snack thing for my kids or, you know, prepping lunch at 10:00 AM so that it's ready at 1130, but I just had the time. Then, you know, just like, just trying to utilize my time in a helpful.

Roni: right.

RIley: Sometimes I'll do it at dinner. I'm like, oh, I'm making dinner. This is cooking. Okay, I've got a little, okay. Last night I did it with enchiladas. I had tons, I mean, I know we talked about this earlier in the episode, but I, I was making enchiladas. I realized how much stuff I was gonna have leftover, and I, while it was in the oven, like melting and heating, I was like, I'm just gonna make a pan for the freezer.

And it, I just utilize that time [00:34:00] and like my future self is gonna be so grateful for that extra pan of enchiladas whenever we eat them.

Roni: Right. Yeah, I think something that I, I realize this every time that I do it, and I feel like I often forget about it until I do it again, which is to utilize frozen vegetables because they're already pre-chopped. I made a Tuscan chicken recipe last week and found these like Tuscan vegetables, frozen Tuscan vegetables at the grocery store, which was what inspired the recipe in the first place.

And it made a, a meal that probably normally would've taken me 45 minutes to an hour, down to 20 minutes because I didn't have to do any of the actual prep work for the vegetables. I just threw a bag of vegetables into the pan for the recipe. So that was a huge time saver and we would, this is something we've talked about a lot over the years, is frozen foods pre-made, you know, semi homemade recipes, that kind of stuff.

Super helpful [00:35:00] when you're low on time.

RIley: Yeah, I agree. And, frozen vegetables are actually not, I mean, sometimes the cost analysis, you know, says like, okay, this is way more

Roni: Sure. Yeah.

RIley: But I, I mean, in the case of those Tuscan vegetables, it really wasn't because it was such a blend of like, more expensive vegetables, like tomatoes, especially seasonally, those are more expensive right now.

But. The, you ha. So you do have to weigh the time versus cost, you know, on some things. Uh, but sometimes it really pans out to be low cost, low effort. Go for it.

Roni: A lot of times, a lot of times you can find frozen vegetables as like a two for one deal.

RIley: Mm-hmm.

Roni: And so, or, and so like if that was the case, I would just probably buy like four of 'em because then you're getting, you're still only buying two of 'em and you're getting two for free. And then it's like, okay, well that could potentially make four different meals.

RIley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I do think that way when I'm grocery shopping. Sometimes if I see something that we normally like and it is a good price or a good deal, I'll just go ahead and grab it. Like [00:36:00] last night I served black beans as a side with our enchiladas, and I love, I really like black beans. We eat them a lot as a side dish with Mexican food.

And so I just went ahead and snagged them. And I know that like I could make a Mexican flavored quinoa salad. I've got everything for that in my pantry right now. And I could, I'm gonna use those beans later, but I've already got them. And because I bought them while they were on sale, it'll make a really quick dinner.

I could, I could literally just eat that for dinner or I could put a grilled chicken with it. I could make tacos with it and it'd be a great side dish. But just kinda like. Kind of thinking in the timeframe of like, you, you eat every single night, you're gonna meal plan every day for the rest of your life.

Like, just thinking ahead a little bit and kind of planning for the, the ahead, I think is never gonna, never gonna bum me out, especially with things that are not gonna go bad.

Roni: Right. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is I don't really see the harm in buying things that are what I would consider non-perishable. Whether it's canned beans, uh, canned tomatoes or [00:37:00] frozen vegetables. Like they're, if you're buying them, 'cause it's like a good deal. Buy one, get one free, or buy three and get the fourth one free.

Whatever the deals are that you find. To me, there's no harm in doing that because you'll figure out a way to use those, and if it takes you a month or two to use them, it's not that big of a deal because they can just hang out. Whereas if you buy yogurt, that's like a two for one deal, but you rarely ever finish one container of yogurt, that's not really a good deal for you because it's gonna end up in the trash,

RIley: Yeah, be smart about it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I've also, another thing I've been doing lately is, um, rotisserie chicken.

Roni: Mm-hmm.

RIley: I have been buying them and freezing them, like not the whole chicken, like, you know, taking, cleaning the chicken, chopping it, pre chopping it, and putting it in my freezer. And that has been.

Wildly helpful in the last, in the last month or so, I think I've done it twice and it became like a chicken pot pie one night. And everything else I [00:38:00] had on hand, like the frozen vegetables I had on hand, the, the way the sauce came together for I had on hand the biscuits I had on hand, like, and so those meals can become very low cost and low effort when you like use something like that.

Uh. So it's just something that's been really helping me and they're, and you can find them very low cost, especially at Costco.

Roni: Also, I was gonna say particularly those Costco chickens, because they're low cost and they're larger chickens than what you get at our King Soupers, and so one of those Costco chickens can usually get us three different meals. Granted, it's just two of us, but usually if I, you know, like take it apart and then I'll separate the chicken out, I separate it into three portions for one of the chickens because I'm like, this is a ton of food.

RIley: Yep. Yeah, tonight I'm actually batch, pre batch prepping another dinner with a Costco. With Costco frozen chicken and and rice and some other things that I'm gonna turn into a casserole and it, it just, yeah, it's already set. It's already fed us twice, I think. So this will be the third meal on it also.

Roni: Yeah. Yeah.

RIley: Yeah, it can really [00:39:00] stretch, especially when you utilize it inside of a recipe instead of it being the main, so.

Roni: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I love to do with rotisserie chicken is to just make a good chicken salad.

RIley: Yeah.

Roni: And then the chicken salad can be in a wrap. It could be on a sandwich. You could put it on top of like leafy greens. Yeah. Chicken salad is so versatile.

RIley: I've been making a really delicious one with cranberries and apple and pecans in it. So good.

Roni: So good. All right, before we wrap up today, I've got two emails that we recently received that I wanna share with everybody, including riley. She hasn't read these yet.

RIley: I'm so excited. I love, I love listener emails.

Roni: Yes. So the first email that we got is from Becky and she's referencing our, our last episode, 1 25 when talking about being too tired and unmotivated, she says just as some, some tips to throw out there for people. Some of the things that she does is she does this like dump style crock pot meals. So, [00:40:00] just so you guys know, this isn't just us throwing this thing out there.

This is real life. People use the dump crock pot meals. A lot of the email is her talking about how she loves plan to eat, which we of course appreciate. And so she said this isn't necessarily a dinner dilemma, but she wanted to write in and ask us about do we keep a separate category in our plan to eat account for recipes we wanna try versus the ones we know are tried and true.

How do you separate riley 

RIley: Oh, that's such a good question. So I have a category inside of my recipe book called Recipes We Love. And so if we love it, I put it in there.

Roni: And that's like a course, right?

RIley: It is a course. Yes. And so everything else just lives within its own. Regular courses, you know, like main dishes, side dishes, appetizers, everything else just kind of lives there.

I will say that I have gotten much more selective about what I import into my account, and so if I import a recipe into my account, I typically immediately plan it. And so that is how [00:41:00] I kind of class, that's how I utilize them. I import it and immediately plan it. 'cause if I'm importing it, I'm probably wanting to cook it.

And so I would say I don't really have a want to try category because I just, if I want to try it, I immediately try it that week within my next meal plan. So I, and if we love it, it goes into recipes we love so that I don't lose it. Because I've worked for Plant Eat and have had a plant eat account for 11 years, I believe, oh, this is the 12th year I think I've had an account.

I have, I need to purge my recipe book. And so I had to create the recipes. We love category because. As most of you listeners know, like I was answering your emails for the first like six years I worked here. And so often it had to do with recipe import problems or issues. So I have recipes imported from for six years that I didn't necessarily want to try.

I was utilizing them for someone else, you know, like to work through a problem, to troubleshoot an issue. And so I do need to do a little bit of cleanup. So how I'm utilizing my account now is [00:42:00] I move recipes we love into the recipes we love category. If I wanna try a recipe, I import very, particularly, I'm, I'm very strategic about what I import and it immediately goes on my planner.

So I'm actually trying it and if it's bad, I'll delete it. Yeah.

Roni: Yeah, I have tags that I use for family favorites. However, I also, okay, so I guess I have three tags that I use the most commonly, which is family favorites, and then I have one that says Roni's recipes and ones that say. Weston's recipes, which is my husband. And so like I use all three of those to d denote like we both really loved this one, which is family favorites.

I really loved this one. My husband really loved this one, so like I'll kind of use those three tags. I'll, I'll sort by all three of the tags and then, uh, choose recipes from that, but I also utilize the Queue. And I uti. So I feel like there's potentially two of the most common ways to utilize the queue is like this is a place for all of my favorite recipes, or this is a place for the ones that I want to try, [00:43:00] like up and coming recipes.

I use it for both. I.

RIley: Yeah.

Roni: So, you know, I just, I have recipes that are, I have like, I think like 30 recipes that are always in my queue that are basically our tried and true family favorite recipes. And then when I import recipes, I almost immediately, if I wanna try them, I almost immediately put them in the queue because I meal plan from the queue 99% of the time.

And so. I just know like, okay, well this is the new recipe. Like I, I don't recognize this recipe card as well as the other ones, right? So I know which recipes in there are new ones. And then once we've tried 'em, if it's a recipe we really like, I leave it in the queue. If it's a recipe we didn't really like, I'll take it outta the queue or I'll delete it.

So, but some people are very particular about, like, my queue is only for recipes that we have yet to try, or it's like only for, you know, a different specific segment of recipes. But I kind of use it as a, a catchall for those things.

RIley: I like it as a holding area. I, I would say I actually don't use the queue for anything.

Roni: Yeah.

RIley: But I like the idea of [00:44:00] the queue. I just don't utilize it for anything right now. It's just not part of my process. Yeah.

Roni: We got another email from Cindy, which actually segues into a lot of what Riley was just talking about. So the two things that, that Cindy said is that she really likes the random recipe button. So if you're not familiar with the random recipe button, currently it's only available on the website.

It's at the bottom of your sort and filtering options when you're on the recipe book. You can either just click the random recipe button, it's gonna pop up a random recipe from any of the recipes in your plan, eat account, or you can put in a bunch of search and filter criteria and then hit the random recipe button and it'll pop up Recipe.

Pop up a recipe that, uh, fits that search criteria. So if you know you're only specifically looking for dinner recipes that have chicken and beans or something, it'll pop up a random recipe for you, which kind of eliminates some of that decision fatigue. And so Cindy said that sometimes she'll just start hitting it over and over and over again and just, she'll just come up with recipes and she's like, oh, I forgot that I had that one.

And then. And then plan it. [00:45:00] But her other tip as somebody who has, she has used plan to eat for a long time is she says, go ahead and curate your recipe collection in plan to eat. She says, what? I'm interested in cooking and eating changes over time. So I've removed a bunch of recipes that I don't think I'll make, or when I have several that are.

Almost all the same, like, why do I need so many pizza dough recipes?

RIley: Yes.

Roni: says it makes for less decision fatigue when she's planning, if she just goes in and kind of purges some things from her recipe book. So

RIley: And less frustration, honestly, because if you are looking for a specific frosting recipe that you always use on your cinnamon rolls, this sounds really specific because it is, and you have 10 in your account, and you have to remember which one is the best one, just delete the ones you don't use. There's literally no reason to have them.

Roni: I mean, I think I talked about this a really long time ago, and I have since. Fixed the problem, but I had two recipes for beef stroganoff in my plan to eat account. And the pictures were really [00:46:00] similar and I could never remember which is the right one and which is the wrong one, until I actually go into the recipe and like read, like read the whole recipe basically.

Because one of 'em was like a, you braise the stroganoff in your oven for five hours and the other one's just like put the things in the pot and it's done. Uh, but I never remembered which one was which. So I finally gave one of them a five star review. You know, five star rating. So that way I could see like, oh, this is the one.

And then I was like, this is dumb. I need to just delete the other one. 'cause I've literally never made it. 'cause I'm never gonna braise it in the oven for five hours.

RIley: I look at my plan to eat recipe book a little bit like my closet, and I have t-shirts that I literally never wear. But can I get rid of them? No, because there's some kind of like sentimental value or something, and I have the same theory that my plan to eat recipe book gets a little bit like this. 'cause I'm like, but what if I might want to, and I literally am never gonna, but I should just.

Roni: Dude, it's so true. I have, every time I go in to do a, a recipe purge in my plan to eat account, a lot of, okay. A [00:47:00] lot of times I do this with the desserts because I have too many dessert recipes in my

RIley: Which is how the recipe button, the random recipe button can be dangerous. And why? It's good to use filters. 'cause if you're looking for dinner and you stumble on brownies, like, okay,

Roni: Yeah, exactly. But I just have too many dessert recipes because they look the most delicious and like the internet is full of them. And so then the problem comes is that then I start trying to like purge from my recipe book. I'm like, oh, well these olive oil, this olive oil cake sounds so good, and why have I never made it?

And I'm gonna keep it in here even though I'm, I'm never gonna make it. I don't even own a spring form pan. I can't make most of the cakes that are in my account.

RIley: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if you're gonna make it, you can Google another recipe,

Roni: Right. It's so true. And you'll probably come across the one that you already had saved because

RIley: For sure.

Roni: it was probably somebody's like most popular recipe, you know? Yeah. I, I need to, this is something I need to like write this on my to-do list, to be like, purge your recipe book.[00:48:00]

RIley: Yeah.

Roni: Which is really easy to do on the Plan to Eat website because we have bulk editing for your recipe.

So you can select a bunch of recipes and hit the delete button. You don't have to like go into each individual recipe and delete. So just so everybody knows, we're enabling you to do the right thing.

RIley: Yeah, purge, donate to charity. Don't hear. Just thinking about my closet again. It's the exact, it's the exact same thing. Apparently. I've got a problem.

Roni: man.

RIley: Well, thank you to Becky and Cindy. I, I love emails from customers and listeners, so please write us.

Roni: Please write us podcast@plantoeat.com. We love hearing from you guys. It just really gives us all the warm fuzzies to know that you guys really do listen to us. It makes us so happy.

RIley: Yeah. I, I, it does sometimes feel like when, just I guess from like a behind the scenes of podcasting be, uh, I consume a lot of podcasts. And then as a podcaster, it's easy to feel like you're just speaking into the void, you know, that [00:49:00] like no one is listening to you. So customer emails and, and like rating our show in Apple podcasts, like those kinds of things like really make us feel like, oh, like we're helping people, people listen.

So we love it. Just like subtle plug to do those things for us.

Roni: Yeah, we really do appreciate it and 'cause you know, we're just regular old people.

RIley: Yeah, who just happened to fall into this job of meal planning and are super into it because we're planners at heart.

Roni: That's right.

RIley: Yeah.

Roni: And on that note, as always, we thank you so much for tuning into us and listening to us every other week. We will see you again in two weeks and we'll be talking about more ways to start off the year right with meal planning.