The Secret Recipe for Stress-Free Family Meals

Ever felt like mealtime with the kids is like navigating a tempest in a teapot? It was exactly like that for me, Sheila, your go-to gal on Zero Waste Imperfectly, until I cracked the code to harmonious family dinners. I'm dishing out the secrets to my meal planning success, which include a love affair with certain cookbooks, a life-changing Trello board, and the sorcery of Instacart shopping. Swap the chaos for calm as I reveal how to save time, money, and your sanity, all while getting your kids involved in the kitchen.

In our latest heart-to-heart, I'll walk you through the transformation of my evening routine, peppered with anecdotes from my own whirlwind life as a mom and entrepreneur. Discover how assigning themed dinner days and smartly leveraging leftovers can turn your meal prep from frantic to fabulous. There's no need to brave the grocery aisles; I'll show you how to shop from the comfort of your home. Pour yourself a cuppa and join me for a candid conversation filled with practical tips to make your family's dinner time a zero waste, delightfully imperfect adventure.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, lovely listeners, and welcome to Zero Waste Imperfectly, the show that talks about all things zero waste with kids. I'm your host, sheila. I'm the owner of Life Essentials Refillery and the mother of three girls, so dinner time it could be an absolute disaster, and with as busy as our lives are, especially now towards the end of the school year, I have come to a point where I said you know what, whatever we're doing for dinner, it's just not working. And I always talk about meal planning, how important it is, but the reality is is that I was not successful with it, and so I think I finally found out a system that works for me and I want to share it with you. And the reason I want to meal plan well plan my meals is for one. It saves so much time. If you know what you're cooking, you can grocery shop ahead of time. You know what you're cooking, you can grocery shop ahead of time. You know exactly what you're going to eat. You know exactly how much time you need to prep for it. It saves money because you're not just buying random stuff. My husband went to the grocery store one day. He came home with $500. I'm like so what are we having for dinner. It was a bunch of random things, but nothing cohesive to make a meal. So you avoid that. Three. The kids can start cooking. So with this new system that I have, the kids can definitely start because everything's arranged for them. They know exactly what to look for, where the recipe is, the ingredients, it's all there, and it avoids the craziness of the evenings. It's so much more peaceful in the house now that we have this all worked out.

Speaker 1: 1:20

So let me tell you what I do. So I have a couple cookbooks that I absolutely love. You don't need to use cookbooks, but you can. Maybe you have your favorite recipes that you already have, or you know, every Tuesday is Taco Tuesday, meatless Monday, whatever it is you do. So I created a Trello board and on this Trello board I need coffee. On this Trello board I have it set up with five cards. No, I do four cards now because we realize we have leftovers, so we don't need to cook five days a week and the weekend we typically do something else. So four meal cards and on this meal card I put the day of the week. It is along with the meal that we're cooking, so whether it's Taco Tuesday, underneath, if I'm using a recipe. I take a picture of the recipe. It actually goes into the header, not underneath, so that the kids can easily see what it is. And then they can go into the cookbook if they want to. Or they can cook straight from the recipe cart or I can. That's on Trello, but I prefer the cookbook and then I, after I have my meal planned out, my meals planned out, I'm an instacart shopper.

Speaker 1: 2:18

I don't have time to go to the grocery store. It's not my favorite thing to do, so I am a a totally Instacart person and I love price comparison shopping on Instacart. So what I do then is I take my recipes, go to Instacart, order whatever it is that I need if I don't have it in the store, and so that part's done. And I do it per day. So I say Monday I need this, and then I try to plan so beans I'm having, maybe I'm having something with beans and rice. So Monday, beans and rice, taco Tuesday. So I know I can use the leftover beans and leftover rice for the next meal, and so I plan it that way and also that way I have, with everything being in Trello, I can look ahead and say I need to sprout my beans on Monday for Wednesday's meal, so it helps keep everything organized. I love that, and so I highly recommend checking out Trello. It's free to use.

Speaker 1: 3:02

Create a meal plan on there. Do your grocery shopping? I do my grocery shopping on Saturday. I shouldn't say I do my Instacart shopper does it for me on Saturday. And that way you're ready and you don't have to worry about it over the weekend, and Monday comes the kids have everything they need for their school snacks, because you already planned for that. Everything was taken care of when you were replacing your Instacart order or your grocery list, however you plan on doing it, but meal planning makes such a big difference. It saves a lot of money, there's no waste, it's just awesome. So take the time. If everything else has failed for you, try Trello and see if you can get that to work for you. I'd love to hear how you meal plan. If you batch cook, you freeze cook, whatever you do, I'd love to hear from you. See, you can find us on all platforms.