A photograph of a smiling Mylene Houle Morency, guest expert on meal planning

Episode 54 – How to Find a Meal Plan That Works for You with Guest expert Mylène Houle Morency

In this podcast, Ingrid talks to Mylène, from Montreal based Flo Organisation, about effective meal planning to help a busy workload. Meal planning is something we all aim to do but often it just slips off our radar and we can find ourselves scrabbling round at the last minute trying to put dinner on the table or resorting to a takeaway or microwave meal. Mylène Houle Morency is an expert in meal planning having fine tuned a five step process to make sure you can easily incorporate it in to your busy schedule.

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Transcript of this podcast episode

Intro  0:07  
Welcome to today's episode of The declutter hub podcast, your channel for super easy, no nonsense advice on how to declutter and organise your home. Please welcome your host professional organisers, Ingrid Jansen and Lesley Spellman.

Ingrid  0:22  
Hello and welcome listeners to Episode 54 of the declutter habits. I'm Ingrid together with Lesley I'm helping people declutter their homes. Check out members got declutter hub.com For more information on our step by step online courses, live q&a sessions, our membership forums, and our checklists and guides. In today's podcast episode, I'm talking to me Len Olmos See, owner of flow organisation working in Montreal, Canada. Mylène  is a fellow professional organiser speaker and a Silverleaf, member of the professional organisers in Canada. She offers organising services primarily to families looking for solutions to free up more time and space while juggling busy schedules. She lovingly tests all of her theories and organisation inspirations on her husband and three children. I had the pleasure of meeting Milan in November 2017, at the professional organisers conference in Toronto, Canada, and we've become great friends and accountability partners ever since. Welcome to the show, Mylène.

Mylène  1:32  
Thank you so much, Ingrid, thanks for having me today.

Ingrid  1:35  
Oh, it's love seeing you and chatting to you anyway. So this is just from your lucky break that I get to talk to you down the podcast as well.

Mylène  1:41  
Same with me. It's a great, it's a nice bonus.

Ingrid  1:44  
Thank you. I am delighted I'm talking to you today. And I can't wait to delve deeper into practical tips. This podcast is all about keeping it real and giving our listeners advice they can put into action, so they feel less overwhelmed and more in control of their lives. Even without children. This is a podcast worth listening to get your head around meal planning. What does it involves meal meal planning? Sounds fabulous. But what does this mean? So Milan, you have created a meal planning course like you said, it is at the moment in French listeners, if you are interested in meal planning, definitely listen to this podcast because we're going to talk about in English. But if you're interested in the course itself, it's in French. So you're pre warned by me now. But I would really like to know about the five step programme that you've created to put meal planning into action. So can you talk me through the five steps and then we're going to delve deeper into each one of them to give our listeners an idea of what you mean by that. So let's do the headlines first.

Mylène  2:48  
Absolutely. So the first step to the meal planning course is to establish your family priorities and set up a family calendar. The second step is to manage recipes. Third step is to facilitate menu planning, which can be a huge nightmare for some people. And the fourth step is to simplify grocery shopping. And finally, in the fifth step, we've got a tail tailored prep. So either is a partial prep or a complete prep depending on which season season of life you're finding yourself into, so that you've got the best solution in front of you when the menu or when your meal comes around.

Ingrid  3:27  
Perfect. So if this all sounded like gobbledygook to your listeners, don't worry, we're now going to actually talk about every step in detail and find out what Mulan actually means. So let's go into the first one then established family priorities and setting up a family calendar. So how does this help us with new planning? What does this mean?

Mylène  3:47  
Yeah, for the first step, like I said to my students, is almost a little bit woowoo. Right? Because like family priorities, what do they have to do with meal planning and family calendar? I didn't think I'd have to think about my family calendar, but they're quite unnecessary steps. You know, what I found as I was helping one on one clients throughout my practice, before I started this course, this online course, is that one of the reasons meal plans were failing when people were even putting the effort of putting one together at the beginning of a at the end of a week, for the following week, for example, is that they weren't taking into consideration the realities of their lives. So first and foremost, when we talk about priorities, if you take the time and all you need to take is five minutes to think about what are my priorities? Is it healthy meals, am I at a time in my career where my career is very, very important. It's taking a lot of hours in my day. So therefore the reality of it is you won't be able to spend an hour an hour and a half a day creating a meal and cooking up a meal. You'll have to find ways to be a little bit more efficient. Is it spending time with family? Is it budget, is it variety? There are so many up priorities that can pop up. And what might happen is that you find yourself having so many priorities, that all of a sudden, all of those can't coexist in reality, it's interesting to note that actually, the word priority became a word that you could put to a plural like make it from singular to plural in the 1800s. Right? I don't know if you knew this. But basically, initially, the word priority was for the first most important thing. And so therefore, that means that you can't have in reality 10 priorities existing in your life. So that's the first step. Once you do do that inventory, brain dump of what your priorities are, if you write all of them down, and you realise you've got too many, then you've got to put them in order and say to yourself, Okay, so what is really important right now, maybe pick three, and then that will orient orientate what exactly you choose as your menu for the rest of the week. So that's the part a of step one. And part B is having a family calendar. So whether you are more of a paper planner, or whether you're more of an electronic planner, just knowing what family activities are coming this week, so that if you've got late meetings at work, or if you've got a dentist appointment, or if you've got your kids have sporting activities that are going to require you taxiing them around, then that all has to be taken into consideration. And I'll take it even one step further. If you look at the weather, whether you're going to planning and be planning to make a barbeque meal, or a slow cooker meal, you have to make sure that the weather kind of matches up because there's no way that you want to be outside in the rain barbecuing up you'd rather planet according to what's going to be happening that week. So all of these things you need to take into consideration so that you can make a meal plan that will stick.

Ingrid  6:50  
Okay, so if I think about like my own family, on Tuesday, for example, in my house, my daughter has got cheerleading lessons after school, and my son has got scouts in the evening. So that gives me only in the middle a short amount of time. So I know on a Tuesday, I can't do homemade pizza made from scratch. That's a Saturday meal. And so on a Tuesday, it's like noodles with some chicken and some veg and a bit of sauce. Because that's done in 20 minutes or 15 minutes, exactly what you mean with, you need to look at your family calendar to see what's going on. So you know how much time you have is that practical.

Mylène  7:32  
That's exactly what I meant. So you're hitting the nail right on the head, you're projecting yourself into that evening, and you realise you're putting yourself also into the feelings of how you felt possibly in the past, when you might have prepared a meal that was completely overwhelming for the time that you did have in on hand. So you have talked about chicken and pasta. And I mean, it could be prepared pre prepared ingredients that you might have cooked on the weekend. So the chicken ideally would even be cooked up already. So you can just whip it all together. And in 15 minutes, 20 minutes have a meal ready on the table.

Ingrid  8:04  
I'm with you so far. How about you listeners? Are you? Are you with us as well? If yes, let's move on then to step number two, I'm intrigued by this because this is managing recipes. Oh my gosh, I'm ready. I'm sitting down, I'm ready for you to tell me how this is gonna work because so much to say about this.

Mylène  8:22  
There's so much to say about this. Especially we're in September 2019, as we are recording this podcast, and we have never had so many options of recipes in the history of humanity, I would say. So I don't know about you in England, but for us in. In Canada, we have Costco. And at Costco we have it's a huge warehouse store. And there's a huge zone where there are books that are sold, and cookbooks are one of the main types of books that are sold. So that means that every single month, there's a new type of cookbook that comes out. And I think what happens with many parents is that we think that this is going to be the solution. We pick out this book, we decide to buy it and we add it to our collection of about 3040 books that we've already got in the kitchen or somewhere near the kitchen. And we looked at it the store but we put it away. And sometimes we just don't have enough time to even look at it. So we've got books, physical books coming into the house, we have got Pinterest boards that are seducing us with these beautiful recipes that looks so good. And that would really be the solution to feeding our picky children possibly. And then we have recipes that are coming in through magazines and things that we might have photocopied from a friend's cookbook, for example. So as you can see, they're coming in from various places, whether it's electronic or whether it's physical, we might be even copying down by hand with some of our grandmother's recipes. And we've got to find a way to make sense of all of this information. so that we can actually go through it and not feel overwhelmed. So far am I? Yeah, am I? Yeah, awesome. So basically, whether you are more of a paper person, once again, what I usually do when I give presentations, and when I speak at conferences and seminars is I usually like to, by show of hands, ask people to tell me whether they're more paper or more electronic. And still, today, we're still very much a 5050. So 50% of people prefer to do most of their management, whether it's time management, or recipe management through the paper route, and the other 50% will go the electronic. So what I recommend is we can maybe go through one, the first one with paper, and then after that, I'll look about talking about electronics. Yep, perfect. Awesome. So if you more if you're more of a paper person, then a family recipe binder is probably going to be the best bet. What I recommend is maybe a one, two to three inch binder that you'll want to keep in the kitchen. And within it, you'll have an index where you can have tabs with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And within dinner, have separate dividers where you'll have the meals separated by types of protein. So I like to go through either chicken or fish or seafood, red meat, for example. I also would like to have a divider, for example, for barbecue meals, so that it's as easy to find as possible. And that way, when you're looking for solutions, what you'll be doing with that family recipe binder is you will be referring back to recipes that you've tried and that have worked for you. I'd like to keep it to that so that you're not feeling overwhelmed. So the idea is to gradually, maybe integrate one to two new recipes from your books that you could refer to, and then try those out. And then maybe the rest of the meals for the week, refer back to that family binder. If a family recipe binder if you're more of a paper planning person, on the other hand, for those of us that are and I'm actually a hybrid. So I don't know why I'm saying those of us that are more electronic, I have a little bit of both, because obviously I like to try both systems to make sure that they keep on working for us. And many of my clients actually have told me that they like that hybrid version as well. So there's three ways, obviously. So the second way is, if you're fully electronic, then I really highly encourage my clients to use one of two methods I my most preferred method is Trello boards, I don't know if you've heard of Trello, if you use it already

Ingrid  12:34  
heard of Trello. But I haven't used it because I'm a paper person.

Mylène  12:38  
All right. So let me guide you through Trello. And give you a bit of an idea of what it might look like for very visual people that like electronics. Trello is a project management free software. This is gonna sound super scary to those people that are a little bit scared of electronics, but Trello is super instinctive. And the idea is to create one meal planning board. And once again, what I like to do within Trello is to have what we call our lists. So it's a vertical column where you'll regroup under that list. One category of things so much like what I spoke about, for the family recipe binder, you'll have one list. For example, for chicken recipes, you'll have another list for red meat recipes, and another one for fish recipes. And within that list, what you'll be able to do is just simply create currents that you can copy and paste a link to your best recipes. But the great thing about Trello is that you can integrate not just links to recipes, but also digital pictures of the recipes that you found in your cookbook cookbooks. So it's a really fantastic tool for people that are looking for inspiration because you can link up photos and all regroups it in a really great way you can put little labels in that so that if you're looking for, for example, 20 Minute Meals, you could create labels for those meals that are 20 minutes. And then within Trello on that board, you can click 20 Minute Meals and all of the recipes that you've put into your Trello board will pop up. So it's a super great way what I love about it, my family and I went to Cape Cod this summer for a week on family vacation. And that means that without bringing my huge family binder of recipes, I was able to have at my fingertips, all of the best recipes that we love with us in Cape Cod providing that we had Wi Fi obviously, yeah.

Ingrid  14:34  
Can I pick up something that I thought was really important? Because you mentioned when you're making the binder, it should be recipes that you've tried and tested and like that go in even if it's a Trello board or a family bond, what do you do? What two things you see? You think, oh, that looks nice. I'm gonna try that out one day. Is that like a separate book somewhere with kind of what you rip it out from a magazine or you put a yellow sticky note on in a cookbook, do you think that's my to try out category one day?

Mylène  15:05  
Absolutely. So, for cookbooks, I recommend my clients take either sticky notes, post it notes, or little 3am tabs to identify as, identify the ones that they would like to try that way, they're much easier to find, as they're, especially when you've got that excitement of that brand new cookbook. And you really want to invest that time into going through all of the pages. And you can even sit with kids with your own kids and say, Okay, let's pick out five recipes that we'd like to try. Because what I'm drawn to versus what my kids are drawn to might not be the same thing. And that might opening, open up a few more options that I might not have thought of. So for recipe books, I'd recommend identifying it with tabs as for recipes that you might have either photocopied or ripped out of a magazine, providing it's a magazine that you own, of course, as I like to say to my clients, and no, no ripping them out in a doctor's office or anything like that. So you take a picture. So when you've got a physical recipe that is not being held in a book, then it could be even a tab at the end of your Recipe Book, which is to try eventually, and then make sure that you limit the amount of recipes to maybe I'd say, maybe 30 maximum, because otherwise, this binder is going to be growing to no end. And it's just not going to be helping you at all, because it just keeps on becoming inventory that you keep accumulating, accumulating without really doing much with it.

Ingrid  16:37  
I couldn't agree more. Because let's be realistic listeners. If you've got five recipes, please don't try and do them all out in one week. It's that's not doable. You might want to try one out over a weekend somewhere, maybe once every two or three weeks can say I'm going to try something new. And if you actually know that, it actually worked out really well. You can get all the ingredients, it actually tasted like you wanted it to taste and everybody was in agreement that it was yeah, let's get this one. Having having whole stacks of things you still want to try out. You can't do five new meal new meals in one week, you have to go back to the tried and tested recipes that you know, are easy to make an easy to do, you can't have, I want to do something every day unless you set yourself like a challenge for one week and go I'm going to do a challenge week. But on a day to day basis. It's just not realistic. We're not chefs. And actually I did a hotel management degree, so I can actually cook quite well. And I don't even do that. I mean, it's spaghetti bolognese on a Monday, you know what I mean? Let's keep it real. Let's keep it real.

Mylène  17:34  
Absolutely, I completely agree with you and Greg's. So the goal is really to keep those new recipes and those potential surprises to the weekend, one, one or two a week maximum. And also, as you start experimenting with various different sources of recipes, you will also realise that some of them take much longer than others. So here in Quebec, we have this great chef, that's his name is Ricardo. And he makes very accessible recipes. But I like to say, despite my love for Ricardo, that I believe that he's got a whole bunch of elves preparing some of the stuff in advance, chopping up all of these little ingredients, so that he can just whip it off of the counter and just create a meal in 20 minutes. And on the other hand, we have this other set of we have a couple of women that work together, and that create these fantastic recipes that are not only low budget, but they're also quickly done. So I know that when I'm in a time crunch, I will not turn towards Ricardo, I'm going to turn towards Puthoff the Acuson chassis or something like that to be able to create something that's much faster. So experience will help

Ingrid  18:44  
loving this so far. Listeners, are you okay? Are you still with us? So then let's move to step number three, facilitate the menu planning. Okay, what does that mean?

Mylène  18:55  
All right. So with that, I really encourage you when you're completely stumped as far as what are you going to be putting on the table because variety is a huge issue for many people. And many people will tell me I don't menu plan because I want to eat what I feel like eating on the day of. And oftentimes what I found with my clients that are not feeling inspired with our menu planned is that there's too little variety, and you've only got about a bank of 10 or 12 recipes that you're making on a regular basis. And so no wonder if you don't feel inspired. If you've got shepherd's pie and macaroni and cheese on a regular rotation basis, you'll probably feel like this is just not an enjoyable part of your responsibilities. That being said, when you facilitate menu planning, I really encourage my clients to create different themes. So this is a really great exercise. If you put on a timer you take 10 minutes to think about every single Last night themes that you could think of. And by night theme, I mean, for example, Mexican recipes and Asian recipes, and assemble yourself recipes, you could really go crazy. It could be leftovers could be a theme night. So create, I love to encourage my clients to go for really start writing up to 20 Different themes that they could think of that work well with their families. And then after that, you can create a rotation. So either create a one week rotation, so that, for example, every Monday is Mexican. And every Tuesdays are tacos, for example. So no, that would not be a good example, actually, because that'd be two nights of Mexican. So on Tuesday would be one good night, maybe Asian for Mondays, I like to keep my themes for vegetarian recipes towards the end of the week, because I like to use up my meat proteins earlier on in the week so that we've got fresh meat, if you're a meat eating family earlier on in the week, so that you're taking advantage of fresh ingredients. And then towards the end the week, if you are turning towards more you mean there is I'm trying to think of the word in English. So no more vegetarian type proteins like beans, black beans, and tofu and that kind of stuff, then that's going to be keeping much better towards the end of the week. So you can have if you want we can work out together. Are there any themes that are coming up in your mind as we're speaking, Ingrid, so I spoke about Asian type meals Asian could be for Monday's or anything else that your family likes as far as the Maddox that

Ingrid  21:36  
Italian things faster. So of course, one week, one week of spaghetti. The other one week is facili. The next week is lasagna. The fourth week is tagliatelle. So you've got really four different types of pastors. Although you're eating a pastor once a week, it's a different type of faster with a possible different kinds of source.

Mylène  22:00  
exactly perfect. So Italian is a great and that's usually a great hit with kids, as you mentioned. So some of it could be special nights. So here in Quebec, we're very big on having fondues or hot chocolate, I don't know, out in England, if that's also something but that's something that takes quite a bit of time. So I like to schedule one or two special nights in the month. So that we'll put together a little bit more effort that requires different kinds of shopping, because we have to go to specialty shops to get the proper cheeses and the proper meats and that kind of stuff. Even the grocery shopping takes a little bit more time. But knowing that within a month, what I usually do when I go with theme nights, is I'll plan a whole month. And then what is fantastic is that you don't have to make as many decisions because now that you know that you're only picking a Mexican recipe or a pasta recipe, then your brain doesn't have to go rummaging through all of its ideas. Or you can just type up Mexican or Italian in your Trello board, if you've put labels on it and that will populate a whole bunch of different recipes which you might not have thought of.

Ingrid  23:09  
In here in the UK. It's probably a roast. People absolutely love a roast on a Sunday. But of course it depends on there's no two types of potatoes and three types of veg and Yorkshire puddings and I mean there's lots going on. So we're roast is a lot of work that's probably normally eating on a Sunday. And it's so interesting because actually this whole when you were talking about it, it's triggered my memory and it's made my husband laugh so much because my mother used to do that with before I even knew the existence of of meal planning. We would have monday, tuesday thursday would have a meat with a potato and a veg on Wednesday was always like either Italian or Chinese with noodles, stuff like that. Friday was always fish because I come from a Catholic family. So Friday was fish. On Saturday. We used to have sandwiches on a Saturday evening. No, no, don't do that anymore. I didn't know why. Because I think I like a hot meal. And on Sunday was always always like the fancy day. Then when that's the day we would have steak or pork loin or something. So it's so funny because my husband recently made like an Asian dish on a Saturday on a Sunday and I went I can't eat it on a Sunday. That's not a Sunday dish and he went, What are you talking about? What are you talking about? And I'm like, no, no, you do the rice or noodles or pasta during the week on Sunday. You eat a nice meat and he was like looking at me like I was like, oh, okay, okay. And he was he couldn't get over it for ages. I got you kidding me? And I'm like cactus is right is not a Sunday meal.

Mylène  24:48  
Exactly. So you can create new family traditions if you'd like and so what I would recommend in that case, I would start with that first week where you're going exactly by the recipe that you grew up with, which would be an Nice comforting way, and a great way for you to transfer that, that family tradition to your own kids. And then after that you could like sit down with your husband to work out the next three weeks of the month, that could be a variety of different things so that you do have the Asian stir fry on Sunday, think outside the box and go crazy. But the great thing is that once you have those thematics, then it's much easier to like really come down that funnel and go from the top of the funnel where you've got so many recipes that you don't even know where to start from. And then you go bring it down to the bottom of the funnel, where it's just to a single type of theme and much easier to create, to make your decision and stop your choice onto the right side recipe.

Ingrid  25:43  
Okay, cool. All right, so then let's move on. So we've now we know what we're doing, we will know which recipes we're doing. We know what kind of night it is. Now we're going to talk about grocery shopping.

Mylène  25:57  
Absolutely. So grocery shopping can be a huge time suck. First and foremost, if you're not planning your whole meals in advance, you might be spending many individual day like partial partial days at the grocery store, if you're stopping in every day. And then again, that's a that's very much an individual choice. So I'm not I don't want to sound like I'm bashing. Some people love, actually the action of going to the shop everyday and picking out some fresh produce. So that being said, if you're looking to find time back into your schedule and recuperate that time, then the goal is to create your meal plan at the beginning of the week. And then write down your recipes or write down your find your recipes and then write down your ingredients either if you're the paper person onto a paper list, and if you're more of an electronic person, then I highly recommend an app called cosy. So I talked about in step one, setting up a family calendar. I'm a huge proponent of the app cosy. It's spelled C Ozette i, and it's a free app that includes both actually three things, a calendar lists that are broken down into to do lists and shopping lists. And the third part of it is recipes. So technically, some of my clients will go all in with cosy and have all of the things that we've talked about so far, directly into cosy. And so the reason why I'm talking about cosy is that, especially for warehouse type shopping, what would be the equivalent? I talked about Costco earlier? Is there such an equivalent in England or not necessarily, is it more of a supermarket type?

Ingrid  27:38  
Yeah, we've got we have got a couple a couple of very large supermarket chains like Tesco and Sainsbury's and as the Mauritian and

Mylène  27:47  
so that's very much like Costco. So here in Canada and also in in the States, there is Costco, but let me go with the example with the Tesco. So you'd probably do most of and I mean, that's probably one of the best deals are so many people will start with that bigger store, go get those big pieces. And then we'll finish off at that second more neighbourhood type store. So I recommend having two separate lists so that you're not getting confused as to where, where you're checking those things off. So in within cosy, I would have one list for that Tesco. And the beautiful thing about cosy is that you can create subcategories. So what I like to do, when we start off in the supermarket, we started started off in the produce section. And then we ended up in the breads section and then the cheeses and then the fresh meats, and so on and so forth. What I've created within my app and what everybody can do within their own cosy app is they can create those subcategories in the order that they will be following it within their supermarket, which is fantastic. I've seen stats say that on average, we spend about 120 minutes at the grocery store. And a lot of those minutes can be spent going back and forth into the aisles trying to find that mystery ingredient like coconut milk that somehow is always like, just put away somewhere where you just can't find it. So if you do if you're the person creating the list and you know of its whereabouts, you can actually place it directly in the area where it might be. And that's leading us to a very important step in meal planning, which is also making sure that you're delegating part of this. So when meal planning becomes a bit of a nightmare, it's probably because you've had so much of a load on your shoulders to to do it from A to Zed. So not just looking at the family calendar, but also deciding on their menu and also creating the list and then going grocery shopping all of a sudden it becomes a monumental task and a huge responsibility on one person's shoulder. So if you do start testing some of those things, it's to go and delegate part of those things and help your husband or wife? Find the ingredients a little bit faster.

Ingrid  30:03  
Shall we move on to the last step? Tailor prep? Yes. Okay, what does colour prep mean? It sounds very cool. But what does it mean?

Mylène  30:13  
Thanks. So basically tailor prep is to make sure that you're choosing the type of prep that works best for you in the particular time of your life that you're in. So as I mentioned earlier on, if you've got young kids that need to have a meal on the table, as soon as you step in the door, that would be having a few meals, at least ready, whether you've done batch cooking, and you've got a spaghetti sauce, frozen up in the freezer, that you might be able to pull up that morning to make sure that it thaws out, or maybe two days in advance so that it thaws out, and maybe have two or three meals that you have prepared on the weekend so that you can put it on the table a little bit more quickly. So that would be in my in my mind, when I talk about complete prep, you've got a bit of batch cooking that you've frozen that that was frozen that you've thought out, and a couple of meals that are completely prepped and ready to either be re heated in the microwave or in the oven really quickly or on the on your cooktop. But whereas partial prep for those people that have a hard time with having decided exactly what they're going to be making, I really encourage my clients, especially on Sunday nights when you're doing that Sunday night dishes extravaganza because you're cleaning so many dishes, because you've made it you've made that big meal. Well while you're doing those make cleaning those dishes, you can pop in some eggs into water to boil up eggs for lunches that week, you can cook up some chicken breasts, so that you've got a base of chicken breasts for whatever it is that you choose to do, whether it's a fried rice later on, or whether it's that pasta that you were talking about earlier today. And also, I like to encourage my clients to maybe stick something into the rice cooker, whether it's quinoa or rice so that they have that base of grains that they can hop into and then create a meal out of without having exactly precisely what they're going to be making. But at least those things that take a lot of time in the evening. So you know, chicken breasts will take half an hour if once you get to the home and you season them and put them into the oven. Whereas if you've got all of those and ready to whip up in a really simplify your evenings. So that's what I'm talking about.

Ingrid  32:21  
So, listeners, we're not talking here about spending a whole Sunday, doing batch cooking in your freezer for the next four months. We're just talking here be smart with your time on when you have a bit time to do to prepare a little bit. So you will save more time later in the week. And you can if you have a busy day, you can use some of your your partially prepped ingredients. And to make your cooking time shorter and you still can provide a healthy meal. Without going back to only eating microwave meals or ordering a takeaway you can still feel that you're you're eating a very healthy during the week when everybody's busy with school and work and running around. Fantastic Milan. So this was your five step programme. I actually have no questions left at the moment. I was just wondering, is there anything else that you would like our listeners to know, while we wrap up these episodes?

Mylène  33:14  
Yeah, absolutely. So before we wrap up maybe a few pitfalls for people that have tried meal planning and it didn't work. One of those pitfalls is over planning. So if you do plan, all seven of your meals that week, I pretty much guarantee that there's going to be one of those or two of those meals that are not going to work out because things happen, life happens. And all of a sudden, what what was on the menu has to be pushed aside because all of a sudden, we've got company over or we're invited over for dinner or we decide to something has taken longer. And we decided to drop by and take away and take something that's going to be a little bit faster. So I'd say limit your meal planning to five per week. The second one that I talked about earlier on is just make sure that you look at your schedule so that it doesn't completely break up the plan that you've made for the week. And the last one is make sure that you look at the length of the recipes that are that you're choosing to integrate into your into your menu, because that can really throw off your plans. And that's about it for me.

Ingrid  34:17  
Well, listeners, awesome advice. I hope really that you've learned a lot as well. I mean, I'm quite I like cooking, and not the fantastic cook. But what I cook actually people like and it's interesting that when my kids were younger, and we had playdates over the kids had friends over and they're safe for dinner, they always say, Oh, your mom would have really liked your mom's food. Can I come back another time to play dress again? So it was like Yeah, I agree with you. We mastered and I think God shared the cooking and I'm normally the one who cooks during the week and he cooks in the weekend. So we try and share the loads. He does the shopping and putting away and then we kind of have a tiny list of okay, this is what We have on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, so everybody knows what's going on. But nothing too complicated during the week because life is just too busy. So keep it keep it real. Yeah, I really enjoyed all your your steps and I loved your also your advice at the end. So that's it for this episode. We hope you've all enjoyed listening and are inspired to take action. Thank you so much Mullen for being our guest.

Mylène  35:24  
My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Ingrid  35:27  
You're welcome. I've absolutely loved talking to you and finding out more about these five steps that are involved in meal planning. Listeners, I hope you've learned a lot as well today and millions examples will be helpful for you and you can implement them in your own home. If you would like to know more about Milan, and our meal planning course, we will post a link in the show notes along with her website details. And if you would like a meal planning checklist right away, check out the resources on the declutter Hub website. Thanks for taking the time to listen today. If you'd like to get more tips and advice please follow us on social media. We are on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as at declutter hub and we've got a lively supportive Facebook group where we chat all things clutter, you can search for the declutter hub community, we'd love to see you there. And don't forget our brand new membership we are now offering step by step online courses, live q&a sessions and a membership community. Have a look on members dot declutter hub.com for more information. If you don't want to miss the next weekly episode, subscribe to the declutter hub podcast on Apple podcast, Spotify and Stitcher and it will pop into your notifications each Friday. See you next time.

Outro  36:39  
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the declutter hub podcast. Check out declutterhub.com for more inspiration, and don't forget to tune in next week.

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4 REASONS YOUR MEAL PLANNING EFFORTS AREN’T PANNING OUT – A GUEST BLOG BY MYLÈNE HOULE MORENCY

Mylène Houle Morency is a Montreal based Professional Organiser from Flo Organisation who loves nothing more than sharing her top tips on how families can plan for success.

When I speak about meal planning, I’m often greeted with ‘’Meal planning isn’t for us, it doesn’t work for our family. I’ve tried before and it never lasts. When I plan, I end up not even wanting to eat what is on the menu. I’d rather eat what I feel like eating.’’

Does this ring a bell? Do you recognize yourself here?

If I think of my time in-home with clients, and of my experiences with clients in my online course on meal preparation, four challenges come to mind in terms of what derails meal planning:

The family’s schedule isn’t taken into consideration

Pardon the expression, but the proverbial cart is often put before the horse when it comes time to meal plan. We think of what we’d like to eat or ask our family members what they’d like to have for supper before even thinking of what is on the agenda both at home and at work. In reality, once the moment comes to meal plan, one should really take a look at the agenda and choose a meal that corresponds with what’s in store for us that night. Late meeting at work or taxi duty for the kids’ activities? Choose an easy meal. Feeling like testing out a new recipe? Pick a weekend night to give yourself the latitude necessary, should the recipe take longer to prepare than expected!

Too many choices for recipe ideas!

There must be stats somewhere that confirm my theory that never before have we had so many options and ideas on what to plan for supper!

Bookstores are overflowing with titles
Magazine kiosks keep adding options to the mix
Pinterest boards are constantly growing with new pins of what that perfect version of us should make for her family
We often share our newly tested and approved recipes via email and text messages.

No wonder planning is complicated, we don’t even know where to turn to with all that choice and all those places. As with most things to do with organizing, we often need to come back to finding one place for everything and putting everything in its place.

Not enough variety

Here in Canada shepherd’s pie, macaroni and spaghetti come back a bit too often on meal plans. Those dependable familiar recipes are often an easy win with picky kids, and increase our odds of seeing them clean off their plates.

But the danger in that is that monotony slips into place and kills our interest in meal planning. I find this is also often a root of the problem for those who resist meal planning. Meal plan? No thank you, I can pretty much guarantee I won’t feel like eating spaghetti next Tuesday!

Is meal planning boring and discouraging for you? I suggest you take a look at what you’ve been cooking up over the last few weeks and see if you’re dealing with too much repetition. If that’s the case, think of injecting a small dose of novelty!

Overplanning and wasted food

I often recommend to only meal plan on three of the weekdays, and to leave wiggle room for the other two meals, relying on pantry meals or previously prepared and frozen meals. Also, if you’re starting from a place where you are simply looking to increase the number of homemade meals you serve, set yourself up for success. Start with one homemade meal per week and gradually increase them. Progress not perfection, as with everything!

When in comes to weekend meals, situations vary from one family to the next, so investigate again:

Do you often get invited for Sunday night dinner at the in-laws’ house?
Do you have a date night every other week which requires you to serve a meal for your kids and the sitter?
Do your kids’ late afternoon football games often throw off your planning and have you swing by the restaurant for take-away instead of starting to prepare a meal at 6:30 on a Saturday night?

There you have it, four potential solutions to get a handle on your meal planning, and to inject a dose of simplicity and ease (not to mention making meal planning *gasp*, enjoyable?). Which tip will you put into action first? Happy planning!

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