This Week’s Mostly Healthy (Gluten-Free) Meal Plan

There are few things that I enjoy more than cooking yummy food. But three times a day? Every day?

I could get overwhelmed just thinking about it if I thought I had to cook something different and interesting for every meal.

But moms! Guess what? You don’t have to do that!

Kids tend to fall in love with a few specific foods and want to eat them all the time. That’s to our benefit! And it’s to your kid’s benefit to indulge them in predictability, which they perceive as stability.

You are not doing your family a disservice by feeding them the same meals or variations of the same meals every week!

For our little family, we’ve come up with a simple meal planning system that works well for rotating meals throughout the month, based on what we can pick up on sale at the grocery store from week to week.

But despite having so many readers email and message, telling me that they would love to see weekly meal plans and shopping lists, I’ve hesitated. Partly because I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep up, but mostly because I’m afraid you all will think our meals are terribly boring and lack variety.

But here’s to being brave!

It’s totally fine if you don’t care for the way we eat – to each their own! – but I do hope you can find some value in our simple meal plans and the way we shop.

Before we get to the meal plan itself, here are a few things you should know:

We don’t really do breakfast

One of my kids wants grits every morning, the other wants oatmeal. I’m trying to steer them away from both (with the exception of steel-cut oats), but we typically do something really simple, and usually carb-heavy, for the kids. I personally don’t eat breakfast or snacks before lunch in the interest of increasing insulin sensitivity and inducing a temporary state of ketosis.

This is also why I have a tendency to do breakfast for lunch or dinner whenever I can justify the carbs (hello pancakes!), or am craving an omelet.

We tend to have a backlog of food in our pantry and freezer

This is by design because it allows us to use our grocery money for what’s on sale rather than what we desperately need and keep our grocery budget lower.

What this means is that not everything we eat this week, is what’s on sale this week. For instance, we’re eating a lot of ground turkey right now, because I picked up 35 pounds several weeks ago, when it was on sale for $1/pound, making our meals SO much cheaper than they would be if I just bought enough ground beef to get us through the week.

I love doing this! But it makes showing pictures of our weekly shopping haul pretty much irrelevant!

So, here’s our menu plan this week. I decided to just group everything into breakfast, lunch, and dinner categories. Think of it as a smorgasbord to pick and choose from!

(Scroll down for details and recipe links)

Click here for a printable PDF version of this menu plan

Breakfast:

• Yogurt with fruit
• Frittata with onions, peppers, and shredded turkey
• Grits with butter and honey
• Steel cut oats with coconut, honey, and cinnamon

Lunch:

• Black Bean Burgers, spinach salad with paleo strawberry vinaigrette, and roasted sweet potatoes
• Ham and cheese omelets (we’re still working on that Thanksgiving ham!)
• Leftover frittata sandwiches (my five-year-old’s creation)
• bean and cheese quesadillas
• Turkey burgers with fried potatoes and sautéed kale

Dinner:

• Ground turkey and kale meatballs, rice, and broccoli
• Leftover brisket and roasted butternut squash (from Sunday), with salad
• Tacos, spinach and kale salad (for me)
• Asian style Stir fried veggies, and rice with hamburger
• Black bean chili with cornbread

Snacks:

• apples, freeze-dried English peas
• Coconut flour brownies
• pears, grapes,
• The new Primal snack sticks (TNP sent us a sample box!)
• Chocolate covered pretzels (leftover Christmas candy)
• Frozen corn (my kids love it – so weird!)