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Planning meals ahead of time can save both money and time, and help a person to be healthier. It can also help to prevent wasted food. Despite all those good points, meal planning was one of the things that I’d barely even given a thought to until a few months ago (when I committed for real to eating out significantly less).

At first I found the process of meal planning very frustrating. I couldn’t think of what to make ahead of time (which was part of the reason I ate out so much) or if I did have something in mind, I’d be missing a key ingredient or two. So there were a lot of quick trips to the store and nights of odds and ends for supper at first. But I’ve finally gotten into something of a groove. Here’s what’s helped:

Little yellow stickies.

That’s right, I plan our evening meals for the month using a set of little yellow stickies and my calendar.

The way it works is simple. Since I was starting from scratch, I got out a cookbook and a piece of paper for the initial planning session. I made a list of meals that we liked to eat for supper, and then thought about what side dishes might go well with them. I was stumped on a few ideas for sides, so Google helped me out there. Then I listed the restaurants that we like to go to. Next, I wrote each meal combination on its own little yellow sticky. I also put each restaurant’s name on individual yellow stickies. This gave me about 20 stickies altogether. (This is the hard part — once you’ve done this things are pretty simple.)

Next, I grabbed my calendar and spread out the stickies so that I could see them all. I flipped to the day of the week that’s the most rushed first, and looked for a meal that could be made in the crockpot. In our house, that’s Monday, so every Monday got a crockpot meal stuck on it. Next, I stuck stickies with restaurant names on them on the days we planned to eat out.

Finally, I went back through the rest of the month and put stickies on the remaining days. I tried to alternate through types of meals (chicken, pork, pasta, beef, restaurants, etc) so that we didn’t get too much of the same type of meal in a row. With the whole calendar in front of me, this was pretty easy. I also left some of the days blank. This is because we are a small family, and nearly every meal that we make provides enough food for leftovers — sometimes 2 or 3 days’ worth. My husband and I usually eat those for lunch, but sometimes we’ll have them (or just snacky-type food) for supper instead.

The best things about this arrangement are its flexibility and reusability. Don’t feel like spaghetti tonight after all? Just trade stickies with a different day. Ready for the next month? Grab the stickies and plop them on new days. You can add new stickies if you think of new meals, leave ones off if they’re things you make only rarely, etc. It also makes it very easy to do our monthly grocery shop. (Plus weekly-or-so trips for perishables.) This way, it’s easy to see what ingredients we’ll need ahead of time.

I’m really glad I started doing this — no more poking into the cupboards, wondering aimlessly what might be good to eat, or feeling stressed trying to think of things. You just think of it once, and forget about it except for the once-a-month applying of stickies.