I have been wanting to share a grocery list + meal plan for a while now, but every week something seems to come up and ruin our meal plan (stomach flu, someone is visiting, impromptu dinners out). But, that’s real life and sometimes meal plans don’t go exactly as planned. So instead of waiting for the perfect week with the perfect plan and perfect execution, here is an honest look at how thing panned out last week.

As soon as Sunday comes around, visions of healthy meals start dancing in my head. I always start the week with good intentions, but unless I do some sort of meal planning, things go south pretty quickly. I would like to claim that I am the type of person who can plan out a gourmet healthy menu every week for my family, but I find that when I keep things basic, sticking to a healthy (ish) menu becomes a lot easier. We also are trying to make an effort to cut down on our food waste, because it can get out of hand in our house really easily. The best way for us to do this is to meal plan and PLAN to eat our leftovers. Otherwise, our leftovers go to waste.

Almost every week, we go to the grocery store midday on Monday. I never seem to have my act together to go on Sunday (because we are usually at my parents house all day Sunday) and I don’t like to go first thing Monday morning. Before I head to the grocery store, I always check the fridge to see what we have and what needs to be eaten. The day we go to the grocery store, I always plan to “cook” a super easy dinner. It usually involves a rotisserie chicken + either a salad or easy couscous/quinoa. I also need to be honest with myself and plan to eat out some meals. Blake and I go out to eat an obscene amount, I will be the first person to admit this. So when I try to meal plan and eat in every.single.meal at home, I am just setting myself up for failure. So, I try to plan for a reasonable number of meals out.

For simplicity sake, I am not including everything BB ate this week. In large part, she ate what we ate, but I threw in a few additions to get her the vitamins she needed (like broccoli, some red meat, and whole wheat cereal). So first thing I will tell you, in hindsight, I bought too much chicken and ended up freezing one package. Second thing, the night I get home from the grocery store I do as much meal prep as humanly possible. I prepped everything for our Tuesday night dinner, I washed the broccoli, and we (Blake) grilled the chicken. When something is already washed and prepped in the fridge, the odds of it going to waste go WAAAAY down for me. Third thing, this week we just happened to eat an unusual amount of chicken. We don’t always eat chicken exclusively. I actually don’t love chicken myself, but it is big blake and little blake’s favorite, so on weeks when I know I just want everyone to be happy and eat what is planned, I go for the chicken. Fourth and final thing, this was a super easy meal plan. I picked all things I’ve made before and know are easy, good and somewhat healthy. If you’re reeeeeally trying to stick to a meal plan, go with tried and true recipes and things you know you like/are easy to manage.

Soooo here is our grocery list/meal plan last week

What I already had in the fridge

berries

shaved brussel sprouts

greek yogurt

lemon

fresh dill

Grocery Run

$128

(we shop at Whole Foods and buy everything organic + no hormone/grass fed as much as humanly possible which inflates your grocery bill quite a bit)

rotisserie chicken

chicken breasts

eggs

fresh mozzarella

quinoa

couscous

oatmeal

yogurt

tomatoes

grapefruit

apples

broccoli

shredded cabbage

cucumber

sweet potato

avocados

red onion

garlic

olives

apple juice

kombucha

M E N U

MONDAY

brunch – we had NO groceries in our house whatsoever so we had a big brunch out monday morning to get us through to groceries and dinner. We also shared a smoothie at the grocery store!

dinner – rotisserie chicken, cous cous, cucumber + onion + tomato salad and homemade tzatziki (greek yogurt, cucumber, fresh dill, garlic, lemon, s+p)

snack – grapefruit (I also had a fat attack and made break and bake cookies and ate them in bed, so I went to the gym at 6am the next morning out of pure guilt)

TUESDAY

breakfast – egg, avocado + red onion

lunch – leftover chicken, couscous + cucumber salad

dinner – grilled chicken + quinoa, shaved brussels sprouts, cabbage, sweet potato + champagne vinaigrette salad

WEDNESDAY

breakfast – oatmeal + berries

lunch -mozzarella, avocado + tomato salad with lemon

dinner – (we got the stomach flu so we didn’t really eat dinner this night but we were supposed to have leftovers from Tuesday night)

THURSDAY

breakfast – we had planned to do eggs at home, but I needed to get out of the house after a bout of the stomach flu and woke up STARVING, so BB and I had a mama daughter date and went to Brunch!

lunch – mozzarella, avocado + tomato salad with lemon

dinner – grilled chicken and brussel sprout salad (shaved brussel sprouts, avocado, EVOO, worcestershire sauce, garlic, s+p)

FRIDAY

lunch – OUT (this one was planned because we knew Blake would just be getting back from a work trip and I would be stir crazy)

dinner – we cooked a belated valentines dinner in (these groceries were bought separately, BUT, we still would have had plenty of leftovers to get us through Friday night’s dinner)

Do you guys like meal plans? Should I do this more often (even when things don’t go exactly as planned?)