The Lazy Genius Podcast - #245 - How I Personally Meal Plan

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

It’s funny - I talk about meal planning a lot here on the podcast, on Instagram, and in my upcoming book that I can’t wait for you to read, The Lazy Genius Kitchen. But I don’t know that I’ve ever shared how I personally meal plan! Seeing the nitty-gritty can be helpful in figuring out your own nitty-gritty, so that’s what I’m going to share today.   Helpful Companion Links Preorder The Lazy Genius Kitchen and claim your preorder bonuses here Change Your Life Chicken (and here’s an episode all about it if you’re interested) Brainless Crowdpleaser inspiration Seasonal Dinner Queue inspiration: Winter, Summer and Fall Follow me on Instagram @thelazygenius Moleskin Pro 12 month weekly vertical planner Episode #177: The Lazy Genius Plans a Day Fearless Chicken Tikka Masala Change Your Life Shwarma Fake Fancy Dinner: Asian Lettuce Wraps Download a transcript of this episode.   This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo, chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Every Day with Amazon. Hi there. You are listening to The Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 245, how I personally meal plan.

It's funny. I talk about meal planning a lot here on the podcast, on Instagram, and exciting in my upcoming book that I cannot wait for you to read, The Lazy Genius Kitchen. but I don't know that I've ever shared how I personally meal plan, like in one fell swoop. My guess is that's because I don't want to be prescriptive and tell you how to do it, that you somehow have to copy what I do. But seeing the nitty gritty, so to speak, can be helpful in figuring out your own nitty gritty. So that's what I'm going to share today.

Now, a quick word to you reluctant meal planners. The phrase meal plan is gross to a lot of people. just want to acknowledge that. It conjures up a lot of images of systems you do not want to maintain. So I want to remind you of a couple of truths. A couple of things before we move forward. First, you get to decide what matters. You get to decide what matters about how you meal plan. If a thorough system matters to you and it helps you get food on a table in the way that you love, please keep your thorough system. If you are not in a season of life, so to speak, where planning ahead is feasible, please don't feel badly about that. The system that you use,

or even the consistency of the system that you use, is not the measurement for whether or not you're doing a good job at meal planning, or if that's even a thing. Can you do a good job at meal planning? Are you eating? I mean, like, you know, you're fine, right? Name what matters to you and then slowly make decisions that support that, whatever that might look like, especially tell yourself that when it looks different from what someone else is doing. It's normal and okay. This is not a contest. Okay. Now the second truth to remind you of not everything can matter. For meals especially, you cannot hold equal priority for the following words, quick, easy, healthy, homemade, cheap. The reason that you find meal planning to be overwhelming is because

you think you can check off every single one of those boxes with every single meal, and it's just not going to happen. There are the occasional, rare, magical recipes that cover more, you know, boxes than usual. My favorite example is Change Your Life Chicken, which is on my website. It is episode 100, all about troubleshooting that recipe. It is my legacy. My joke is that there will be a chicken on a tombstone. But even change your life chicken isn't a magic pill just like perfect meal planning every single time. Okay?

You cannot prioritize everything for every meal. You can't even prioritize everything for every season of your life. Some seasons can hold more homemade food than others. Some seasons can require more time than others. It changes with you and your skills and your schedule and your needs. So please, please, please remember. that not everything can matter and that that is normal. If you think that you are missing out on some meal planning gene

or that you can't find the secret cookbook that everyone else has that will help you be in a flow with dinner forever and always, you're going to drive yourself crazy looking for something that doesn't exist. There is not a system that exists for every person in every season. There's not a recipe that exists for every person in every season. Now there are tools that you can use to build a system that works for you right now, and we will go through those next. But remember that not everything can matter.

Please let some stuff go. And finally, remember that meal planning is just deciding what you're eating a little ahead of time. How far ahead is up to you, how much you plan is up to you. But don't get bogged down by that phrase, by the phrase meal planning, and think that it's more complicated than it is. It's just deciding what you're eating a little ahead of time. Okay. Next up, let's do a quick glossary review.

There are three tools that I use to meal plan in different ways, in different seasons. But before I start throwing those terms around with how I use them, let me define them here, especially in case you're new or you just need a refresher. The first term for lazy genius meal planning is brainless crowd pleasers. These are meals that take very very. little brain power on the part of the cook and are generally pleasing to the people who will eat the food. Now, the beauty of this term is that anything, any meal, any recipe can be a brainless crowd pleaser. We all have different brains and different crowds. There are recipes that you might cook

that have multiple steps and look kind of complicated because you've been making them for so long and we're taught how to make them as a kid or whatever that they don't require brain power from you. you can more or less go into autopilot right and make that meal the same goes for crowd pleasing your crowd might enjoy something that mine does not and vice versa so a brainless crowd pleaser for you could be roasted salmon with rice and sauteed spinach because it's quick it's easy you know how to do it it's brainless everybody eats it it's fine and for someone else that would require way too much brain and their crowd would be very angry so you get to decide what a brainless crowd pleaser is for you, but that definition is versatile for everyone.

Now, the reason that you need brainless crowd pleasers in your life, and frankly, you already have them, even if you have not named them as such, is because you need quick wins. You need dinners that you don't have to think about, that you don't have to stress over, you don't have to wonder if anybody's going to complain. You need a confident choice, even if it's hot dogs. You need a confident choice. Now, you can have two brainless crowd pleasers. You can have 20. you can have $122. It doesn't matter. But list them out, write them down somewhere, have a list that you can reference when you need to choose what's for dinner. The second term to know is a meal matrix. A meal matrix is a way for you to decide once, a beloved lazy genius principle,

what you'll eat on what day. It is the scaffolding of your meal planning decisions, the plug and play part of your plan. You might have a meal matrix that covers every day of the week. Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Soup Wednesday, Rice Bowl Thursday, Pizza Friday, Take Out Saturday, Leftover Sunday. You might only want a matrix one or two days a week. So you can assign decisions to as many days as you want or as few and you can categorize your decisions based on anything you want. So you could create a meal matrix based around recipes, based around cooking methods or even appliances, around ingredients, around protein, around how long things take, around cuisines. You can even mix up a bunch of those in one week, right? You don't have to make the whole week based on an appliance. You're basically

deciding what kind of meal you need to have on a certain day and then you lock that in until it doesn't work anymore. And then the third term in our meal planning glossary is a dinner queue. A dinner queue is a curated list of meals that makes sense for the season of life or season of the year that you are in. It's like a summer reading list or a Netflix queue. You have looked at the collective whole of all your possible choices and you have picked the ones that you want to focus on for now. That makes sense now. A dinner queue keeps you. you from searching the entirety of the internet and your cookbook collection and your saved recipes on Instagram to pick tomorrow's dinner. You just need tomorrow's dinner. Make it smaller. Make it simpler.

And a dinner queue helps you do that. Now before I get into how I personally meal plan using these tools, I have some fun news. I have a book coming out on March 22nd, which is 10 weeks away, you guys, what on earth? Called the lazy genius kitchen. It is a resource you will use forever and always on how to be a person in the kitchen. Every month, we have a new pre-order bonus for folks who decide to buy the book early before it's released as a huge thank you for putting your trust in me. And this month's January's pre-order bonus, they are cute, like simple digital downloads of places to list out your brainless crowd pleasers, your dinner queue,

and even monthly calendar sheets for your personal meal planning, which I will get into in a little bit. They're so cute. They're free in your inbox when you pre-order the book. And then this is a very important part. Listen up. Please. That was bossy. But listen. You have to go to the lazy genius kitchen com and you have to tell us that you bought the book. Just because you pre-order from whatever retailer you you want, it doesn't mean that you get the bonuses because we don't know that you bought the book. So you have to come tell us that you did so that you can be put into our system and then you can get those bonuses delivered to you. So this month are these like really cool meal plans.

downloads. Now the other piece of news is that I'm going to go live on Instagram tomorrow, Tuesday, January 18th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time at the lazy genius on Instagram to answer all of your meal planning questions. We're going to just have a meal planning, little gathering. And I'm also going to explain how to meal plan a month at a time. I'm not going to go into that super specifically here today, but I will tomorrow on Instagram Live. So be sure you join me there. I used to do Instagram lives every single week. We don't do them nearly as often anymore, so I'm really excited to get to hang out with you guys, like in the middle of the day. We'll be right back. It's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series

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can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Now let me explain how I use those meal planning tools that we just went over to decide what's for dinner. My personal meal planning routine starts on Sundays. Usually in the morning, if I don't have to be at my church early to play music or run sound, which I do those fairly regularly. But if not, I do it in the afternoon.

Or at least that's the goal. Now listen, does this happen every single Sunday without a hitch? Of course not. Remember, plans are intentions. They are not past, fail. If I don't meal plan like I planned on a Sunday on the morning or the afternoon, or I'm doing it at night, which I don't really want to do it at night, but if it gets moved to the night, that doesn't mean my system or my soul are broken. It just means I didn't meal plan when I plan to. It's okay. It's all going to be okay. So, but for the most part, most of the most of the Sunday mornings, I pull out three things. My paper planer, my phone, and then a pad of paper, like just like a little tiny pad, not like a big legal pad or anything. It's for grocery lists.

Those are my constant tools. Now, depending on what I need for my meal plan, I might add a cookbook to that pile. All right. Now, how I move forward with my meal plan for the week, it depends on if I've already made a meal plan for the month where some stuff is already penciled in. Sometimes I have it. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I take the time then to make a monthly meal plan. Sometimes I don't. I will go into the process of that and how it's way easier than you think it is on tomorrow's Instagram live. Or there is an old highlight on Instagram of how I monthly meal plan. But for the sake of this conversation now, we're going to assume I do not have a monthly meal plan in place and I'm not going to make one.

Okay, we're just looking at an empty week. Now, here is something that helps me. I do my weekly meal planning. At the same time, I do my actual weekly planning. I look at the week ahead. I move appointments from my Google calendar to my paper planner. And then I make better, more comprehensive choices about dinner because I'm looking at everything collectively, not to.

just meals separate from everything else. A quick side note, I only put things in my paper planner week to week, not when they immediately come up. Appointments and stuff like everything first goes to my Google calendar. It goes digital first. And then I use my paper planner to organize my week, but only one week at a time. So just so you know. Okay. So I move my meetings and my appointments and stuff to my paper planner. I also look at my to do list for the week that exists in a digital platform. form for my business. So I look at what I need to do for work. I move that to my paper planer. I look at a whiteboard we have in the kitchen that holds like little reminders of things we need to do, just like life stuff. I look at last week's to do list and anything that didn't get done.

And I add all of those things to my paper planner. Okay. I also check the weather in this process. Sometimes that affects things, affects dinner. Sometimes it doesn't. Now, before I started putting this episode together. I don't know that I realize that so many other things for me go into figuring out what's for dinner. But for me, it makes sense. For my family, for my personality, for my schedule, all of it is part of one kind of flow of energy. If I have a longer task list and more appointments on a particular day, it makes total sense that I'm going to be more tired at the end of the day. and at dinner that night, it needs to be as utterly brainless as possible. It is hard for me to plan concretely what's for dinner without knowing what else is in the day.

That's why when I mentioned the monthly meal plan before, some things are penciled in. They're just placeholders because I can't always know how busy a day is until I get to the week that that day is in. right so as i look at my week i notice what days need the most brainless crowd pleasing meals and i write those down now the planner that i use because this is where where i write it all down the planner that i use that i really love this is my favorite planner that i've ever used i think um the jury's still out because life life changes and all the things but i i love this planner it is the mullskin pro 12-month weekly vertical planner. I'll put it in the show notes. It has full month calendars in the front, which is where I put meals. And I plan out a month if I want.

And when I don't have a month of meals planned, it's where I put the dinner choices, regardless if I make them one week at a time or one month at a time. So I kind of log what we're eating for dinner in this monthly calendar. That's all that goes in the monthly calendar. That's it. Not appointments, not anything else. the meals. I also have in this paper planner and the small skin, I have our list of brainless crowd pleasers written on just a blank notes page in the back of the planner. So all of it's in one place, at least for now. You know, it's working for now. I'll keep using it until it doesn't work anymore. We've got to hold things more loosely, all just as a concept, as a person, use things until they

don't work anymore. And then try something else. So I have the planner opened to my weekly spread that's how this planner, it's a weekly planner, which I love. And I can see, I can see my days. I can see my flags, my chairs. If you don't know what I'm talking about, more on that in episode 177, how to plan a day. And then when I look at that, I write down my meals in the monthly calendar, okay, inside that paper planner. And I flip back and forth between that and my list of brainless crowd pleaser. So I can like write down and go, okay, so I am flipping around, but I'm flipping around in one place. And it's fine. It works for me. So I write in the meals that makes sense for that week. And because I write down those meals in that monthly calendar page, I can see what we had last

week for dinner and the week before that for dinner. And I can make decisions of how long it's been since we've had spaghetti and if I'm ready to plan it again. You know, I like putting meals on a monthly calendar anyway, regardless of whether or not I plan a month at a time, just so I can see what we ate. It's because we repeat things a lot. Kind of helps. So once brainless crowd pleases are in their place, I will fill in any holes using my meal matrix. We have pizza every Friday, sometimes Saturday, depending on the weekend, but we always have pizza every weekend at least. We also always have a leftovers or hot dogs day. Sometimes it's a leftovers or breakfast day, depending on the vibe. But we always have a leftovers or meal that's usually on Sundays.

I also usually plan pasta on Mondays because pasta is easy and my kids don't complain about it. It's just a dependable way to start a week, you know? We also almost always, every single week, have some kind of rice bowl. Trader Joe's Mandarin chicken and rice. Ticka Massala, which is on the website and rice. Change Your Life, Shwarma, which is also on the website and rice. Stir fry and rice. Pork and mushrooms, which is on the website and rice.

We just like stuff on rice, man. I even have an entire podcast episode series, I think it's four episodes on food and a bowl, primarily bowls filled with rice. All of those links will be in the show notes if you would like them. So I fill in empty spots on my weekly calendar using my meal matrix. It limits my decision making, which I always, always love. Then, if there are still blocks left over, okay? and I, or maybe if I really want to add something new, you know, like if we've just repeated a lot of

the same things and it's like, all right, we're trying a new recipe tonight. I will pull out a cookbook one cookbook, one, and I will choose something from that. Now, most of the time, that decision is also limited because when I get a new cookbook, I read it and I mark pages of recipes that I know will work. for my family, not just ones I'm excited about, because I'm excited about a lot of recipes that do not make sense in my life right now. So I only mark recipes that fit that I will make. It's kind of like a dinner queue, but in cookbook form, right? And I mark those pages with a little bit of washi tape. That way when I flip through, I only flip to those washi taped pages and not the entire book. Just works great. So if I'm going to choose something new, I choose from one cookbook that's already

limited in its choices. Then I mentioned that pad of paper I have. I will make a grocery list of things that I need kind of as I go as I meal plan. Some things I already know I have, you know, staples for our particular kitchen, because everybody has a different list of staple ingredients that you always have. So some things I know I already have, or I will take the time to, you know, check and make sure we have what we need. Then I will look at that list. And I'll, will schedule a grocery pickup for that stuff for the next day, or if what I need isn't at Walmart or Target, which is where I usually do my grocery pickup, I will plan when I'm going to go inside a store. I cannot leave grocery shopping to chance. It must be planned. Now, if that plan doesn't work out,

that's okay. Again, plans are intentions, not pass-fail. But I plan when the food is going to arrive at my house. And then the final step is that I copy the meals that I just planned, that I wrote in my paper planner, I copy those onto a dry erase board in the kitchen. That is so my children who ask what's for dinner when they're eating breakfast can know what's for dinner without asking me. And I don't mind answering them, like, you know, like I'm fine. But they also ask me all the time, multiple times a day. They don't remember the answer. So, So having it written down and then just like chirpily saying like, look at the board. It helps me not get angry at them.

So it's worth writing it down twice. And that's how I personally meal plan. Now, just so you know, we eat, I'd say 90% brainless crowd pleasers, maybe 95. And our list of those is about 20 to 25 meals. So we repeat things a lot. We eat the same general things over and over again. things we eat at least once a month, if not every couple of weeks, some things every week. But I've said this in multiple places over the last few years.

That is the season of life that we're in and that is okay. It matters more to me that we eat in a way that is reasonably pleasant and not super stressful than eating a lot of new stuff. Like that's our priority. That's what matters. So we build around that. And just for the context, by the way, like all of this, this whole, process of meal planning takes about 15 minutes. It's not a huge task. It's a fairly simple rhythm

because of the tools that we just talked about, because of the list of brainless crowd pleasers, because of our loose meal matrix that makes it easier for me to make decisions quickly, because of limited choices in a dinner queue, whether that's a written list of meals for the season or a choice to cook from just one cookbook or website at a time, right? You can make these tools work for you in whatever way you need to. I am guessing that you are going to have some questions about meal planning and I'm so excited to be able to answer them tomorrow. Tuesday, January 18th at 1 p.m. Eastern on Instagram at the lazy genius. So I cannot wait to see you there. And before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week it's Debbie with no last name that I

personally know. So sorry, Debbie, who left a comment on the blog post for Change Your Life, Schwarma, which I mentioned earlier, she simply shared that she tried the shwarma in the air fryer. She's still playing around with the timing. She tried 30 minutes. It worked great. But here's why this is worth celebrating. One, I got an air friar for Christmas slash my birthday, and I will keep you posted on all the air friar things. So I can't wait to try my shwarma in the air friar. But the second thing, and most importantly is, I love it when you guys make lazy genius things work for you. My goal is to have a collection of versatile, personalized tools and principles and a culture of so much permission so you can adjust and make things work based on what matters to you.

And even though this was just trying a new cooking method for a recipe, Debbie did that. She did that by trying Schwarm in the air fryer. And I love it when y'all make stuff your own and then share it. So thank you, Debbie, for being our lazy genius of the week. Okay, y'all, that's it for today. Don't forget about tomorrow's Instagram live, and thank you so much for listening today. Until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that.

More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming you. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.