Meal Planning. It’s a necessity of life, because it seems that my family likes to eat at least 20 times per week, give or take. Multiply that by 52 weeks a year, and we’re talking about 1,000+ meals! I’ve often dreamed of having a live-in personal chef…in a perfect world, all of my delicious, nutritious meals would magically appear on my table each and every day. However, that has yet to happen, so every Saturday morning I stare down an empty dry-erase refrigerator calendar and attempt to plan a reasonably healthy, varied, fun, and liturgical meal plan.
including Saturday morning meal planning.
Saturday Morning Meal Planning
Here’s my basic Saturday morning plan:
- Make coffee
- Drink coffee while I clean out the refrigerator, freezer, and pantry
- Use my MealBoard app to note anything we’re running low on
- Fill in refrigerator calendar for the week, including meal plan
- Add meal plan to MealBoard app and generate grocery list
- Order groceries on Instacart for delivery
- Enjoy the rest of my day
Some things rarely change, such as the time we go to Mass on the weekend and PSR on Wednesday. My children each have one additional weekly activity: dance for my daughter, and violin lessons for my son. Sometimes there are more, but we try to keep whitespace on the calendar when possible so that we can focus on family time, including liturgical celebrations. Liturgical living is much easier when we purposefully make time for it.
Liturgical Meals
Focusing on liturgical planning first and foremost helps keep our priorities in the right order, and it also helps reduce decision fatigue. It helps give us focus and limit choices for any given week, and I love that. Here’s how this week turned out:
- Sunday: Mother’s Day! Breakfast will be waffles with strawberries and whipped cream (I’m SO excited!), lunch at my parent’s house, and dinner at my husband’s mom’s house. This means all I have to do is buy some fruit, and…done. If only every day could be this easy!
- Monday: The Feast Day of St. Damien of Molokai. This focuses our meal plan on Hawaiian cuisine, which is very welcome because we spent our honeymoon in Hawaii! And, thanks to my Prayer and Planning membership at www.catholicallyear.com, I actually found a Hawaiian recipe that doesn’t involve pineapple (my least favorite food). Yes, it was a little bit difficult to honeymoon in Hawaii and avoid pineapple, but I made it work. I’ll be skipping the Pineapple Upside Down Cake suggestion, although I’m sure some people love it.
- Tuesday: May 11 is my husband’s baptism anniversary, so we’ll be having his favorite – Beef Enchiladas from the Magnolia Table Cookbook.
- Wednesday: For the last night of PSR, we’re having a party including dinner. Since I’m a Catechist, I get to be there for the dinner – woo hoo! Daddy will be content at home with his leftover Enchiladas.
- Thursday: For the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, I thought a yellow menu plan would be good. Quiche (yellow, shaped like the sun) with lemonade for dinner, with Dancing Sun cupcakes for dessert will be fun! The cupcakes will be something like this. I’ll be sure to share a picture on Facebook and Instagram! We like to watch The Day the Sun Danced for this feast, so we’ll probably turn it on while we eat the cupcakes. Click here for more Marian liturgical food ideas.
- Friday: I don’t eat meat on Fridays in order to make every Friday a “little Good Friday.” Read more about why Catholics should still abstain from meat on Fridays here. This week, I’m planning to make a delicious meatless pasta from the Magnolia Table cookbook. It’s one of my favorite meals, and it is still the week of Mother’s Day, after all.
- Saturday: I don’t usually plan much, if anything, for Saturdays. I order groceries on Saturday morning, so if I think of something last-minute, I can always order it then. We might have enough leftovers to eat that don’t need anything (although lunches throughout the week are usually leftovers too), or we might get takeout.
This calendar will hand on the refrigerator all week where my family will see it many, many times, so I try to make it colorful and fun. Sometimes I even google a drawing of something like a hibiscus flower and attempt to draw it. By the end of the week, my daughter has usually added her own decorations.
A Liturgical Quote
In the notes section at the bottom, I always add a quote – usually either from a Saint of the week or from this Sunday’s liturgy. I love when my kids ask me questions about whatever I’ve written, or when they recognize it the next morning at Mass. This week’s is from Sunday’s gospel reading. So was last week’s:
The MealBoard app lets me compile my grocery list with the click of a button. My preference for meal planning is to get it done as fast as possible! I’d ordered groceries online even before the pandemic, and as a working mom, this might be my best-ever tip for saving time.
All that’s left is to hang the calendar on the fridge and wait for our groceries to be delivered!
Now, let’s eat!
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