As a stay at home mompreneur, I often find that by the end of the day, I am toast.  After doing school with the kids, working my business, and taking care of household duties, I just don’t have the energy to spend two hours making dinner.  At times, it can be tempting just to make sandwiches or order a pizza or, even better, go out to eat!  But, since my family’s health is important to me, and we all know that eating dinner as a family is important, as well, I had to figure out a way to make dinners work.

Thankfully, I have a great friend who specializes in meal planning.  I sat down with her a few weeks ago and made a plan–using the dinners that my family likes, the types of foods that we appreciate, and the time that I have.  Basically, Jessica taught me to minimize meal preparation time by preparing several meals at once.  Another strategy was to plan for some easy dinners–hot dogs on the BBQ, breakfast burritos, etc that don’t require much preparation.

So, last week, I was to bring dinner to a friend who just had a baby, and she requested meatloaf.  So, I pulled out four, instead of one, packages of grassfed hamburger, and decided to try out Jessica’s plan.  I put all four packages of hamburger into one bowl and added 4 eggs and some salt and pepper.  I made some hamburger patties to BBQ later that week and put those on a plate in the fridge.  Then, I mixed in some crumbled saltine crackers.  I made enough meatballs for one dinner and put those in the freezer.  Finally, I added in my secret meatloaf ingredient–tons of ketchup–and made meatloaf cupcakes–enough for my friend’s family and my own family.

Voila!  Four dinners in less than 30 minutes.  I had a great dinner in the oven, another planned for later in the week, and a dinner in the freezer for the next week.

Today is meal plan #2–Chicken!  I will let you know how it turns out!

Karen