Take a peek into our what real food meals our family of 5 ate for 2 weeks!
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My arch nemesis…
Meal plans. Yep. I just despise them! While I have a framework for how meals flow in my house, I don’t tend to plan weeks out in advance because, quite frankly, it overwhelms me! BUT! I know it is so helpful to see how other families are making real food meals work, so I work in a little bit of a backwards way…
What we ATE instead of what we plan to EAT!
I took a typical 2 weeks of meals that we ate this fall, and wrote it out for you. Planner-aheader’s (yes, that is totally a word), you’ll love to use the shopping list on the side and may even want to follow the plan meal for meal. Those of you that are just curious and need a few ideas or inspirations, hopefully you’ll pick up a few ideas to use in your own meal rotations!
My biggest piece of advice…
Don’t get overwhelmed. If you are new to cooking and real food, might I make a suggestion? Perhaps just starting with ONE meal of the day for a whole week? Just look at how I did breakfast. That’s it. Block out the lunches and dinners. Just start with how to flow breakfast from one day to the other in a real food way. Make yourself a nice little sustainable habit, and then you can move onto lunches, and then dinner.
A note on portions…
This meal plan is based on my crew. Right now, my girls are 16, 14, and 12 years old. And, in the fall, when this meal plan was made, they are all in very intense sports. My youngest is in year-round gymnastics. My older 2 run cross country in the fall, and track in the spring. Which, ends up basically being training all year round these days! They do require a lot of fuel! If your kids are younger, or need smaller portions, just adjust that! If your kids need more, add more!
Let’s talk about eating seasonally!
I’m a huge fan of shifting produce with the seasons! So you’ll see a lot of squashes, apples, warm soups, and not a ton of salads for the fall! Hopefully I’ll muster up the desire to make another one of these “what we ate” plans this summer so you can see the difference. If your crew isn’t into certain produce that I’m listing, simply swap it for what your family likes.
How to adjust the plan for YOU!
- Swap the meal ideas for what YOU like! For instance, if I’m prepping pumpkin muffins or creamy broccoli soup for the week, but your crew doesn’t like those, swap for a different muffin and/or soup. There are a ton on my blog (use the search bar above) and also in my cookbooks (use the menu bar at the top of the blog to see those!). If they don’t like veggie soups, serve roasted veggies instead. If you aren’t beef people, swap for chicken, and so on.
- If you need more prep time on the weekend, or need to adjust it to a weekday due to work schedules, do that! The column to the right that shows all the prep stuff can be done all on one day, or spread out.
- If you don’t have crazy sports schedules after school and on the weekends like I show in this 2 week plan, by all means, don’t feel like you have to prep how I am prepping! For example, we have super early mornings every Saturday due to early gymnastics practice and early cross country meets in the fall. If you don’t, then absolutely enjoy a slower morning and bake or cook then, instead of the night before like I do! On the flip side, my husband and I both work from home, and sometimes do a little food prep on Monday’s while we are working. If you work outside of the home, you may need to move your prep time to a different day or weekend.
Let’s chat!
Let’s get all your questions listed in the comments below! I’d also love to hear some of YOUR household tricks for meal flows. You never know…your ideas might help someone else too!
So here is the 2 week plan!
CLICK HERE to get your free PDF with clickable recipe links! You can also click the image below.
