In principle, making sure your family eats a healthy diet is very straightforward. In practice, keeping everyone happy without blowing the budget or spending hours in the kitchen can be a major challenge. Fortunately, a bit of strategy can make that challenge a whole lot easier. With that in mind, here are four top tips for family meal planning.
Inventory your kitchen
There is a very good reason why commercial kitchens generally have inventory-management software. It means they never have to wonder about what they have in stock or where it is. They always know and that helps them to run smoothly under pressure.
This is probably way too much for the average family kitchen. A basic spreadsheet, however, should do the job nicely. Unless you really hate technology, it’s best to have an electronic inventory so you can update it easily. In fact, ideally, you should be able to update it on your phone.
If creating an inventory of your whole kitchen sounds like way too much work, break it into more manageable pieces. Inventory one part of your kitchen at a time. Whatever approach you use, see if you can purge some items as you go. Anything you keep you should use. In the case of food supplies that means ensuring it’s eaten before its use-by date.
Once you get this system up and running, you should only ever need to keep a manual track of the foods your children access by themselves. This should make both shopping and cooking a whole lot easier.
Build a recipe bank of go-to meals
Go-to meals are meals that meet three criteria. Firstly, everyone in your family will eat them, at least with minimal adaptation. Secondly, they can be made with ingredients you always have in storage. That means pantry and frozen food. You might add fresh or chilled food to them as an extra. You should not, however, need to rely on them to make the dish work.
Thirdly, they need to be easy for you to cook. What that means in practice, of course, depends on you. It isn’t just about your cooking skills. It’s about whatever else you need to fit into your life. Keep a copy of these recipes on paper (or on index cards) so you never have to think about what you need to do.
Try out new recipes when you have the breathing space to enjoy cooking and eating them together. It’s important to keep introducing your children to new food experiences and it’s good for you too. Diets for dads shouldn’t just be about safe dishes the children are (practically) guaranteed to eat.
Stockpile your basics and adapt them
If you want a case study of how the food industry works, head to your local supermarket and look at the jars of sauce. Chances are the vast majority of them are variations on a few main flavors typically white sauce, tomato sauce, and mushroom sauce. You may even have loaded up your cart with these as an easy way to ring in the changes in your meals.
Actually, this approach is making your life harder rather than easier. Just buy or make the basic sauces. Then adapt them to whatever it is you want to make. After all, how difficult is it to add some mushrooms or herbs to a plain tomato sauce?
Learn to love frozen ingredients
Frozen ready meals are variable, to put it mildly. These days, you can get options that are both healthy and tasty. That said, you tend to pay a high price for them. Frozen raw ingredients, by contrast, are often a great way to combine nutrition and convenience at a reasonable price.
Frozen (and canned) foods are preserved when they are at their freshest (and most nutritious). They are therefore at least as healthy as their fresh counterparts. Admittedly, they have their limitations. For the most part, you wouldn’t just defrost them and eat them raw, for example in a (fruit) salad. If, however, you’re cooking/baking them, they have a lot of benefits.
Firstly, you can get them pre-prepared (e.g. peeled and chopped onions). That can save you a lot of time and energy. Secondly, they have a long shelf-life so you can stock up and not worry about food waste. Thirdly, they often make very efficient use of space. For example, it’s usually easier to shove a bag of chopped carrots in the freezer than to find space for fresh carrots.
Canned and dried foods can also be good. The main problem with them is that it can be difficult to store leftovers after the can/packet/box has been opened. You also tend to need to use them up quickly. What’s more, there’s usually more preparation involved. For example, canned foods often need draining and dried foods soaking. That said, they definitely have their uses.
