Reverse Meal Planning

I’ve always been a meal planner. In fact, the thought of not writing down what we are eating this week would send me into absolute panic mode. In fact, I love meal planning so much that I plan everything: not just dinners, but breakfast, snacks, and lunches for the week as well. I shared in a recent post about how I planned for meals when my youngest daughter was contending with multiple food allergies. This worked great during that season, but once we reduced her allergies to only peanuts, I began to feel a little lost. I had assumed I would begin incorporating all the dairy-laden meals we hadn’t eaten for years back in, but I was so completely in the habit of simple meal planning that I couldn’t seem to make the transition. But I also no longer had the challenge of adapting recipes to make them safe for her, and I was, frankly, bored in my kitchen.

If you can relate to feeling like you’re in a season of making all the same meals and wishing you could do something different, but not being sure of where to begin, I have the answer: reverse meal planning! I didn’t know there was actually a name for what I’d been doing in my kitchen until earlier this year, but note that if you do a quick search online there are many wonderful people sharing their methods for reverse meal planning, and probably none of them will look exactly like mine. I’ve taken the basic process and tailored it to make it work for me, which is what I’ll share here today. I needed more structure than most reverse meal planners do, so I added that, but if you are a free spirit you may prefer a more traditional version of reverse meal planning. Frugal Fit Mom on YouTube is a great resource for this, and if you subscribe to Crystal Paine’s newsletter (she blogs at moneysavingmom.com), she shares her grocery hauls and how she meal plans from them, as well. Meal planning should feel unique to you, so don’t be afraid to experiment until you find what works for you!

I’d like to give you a nice, neat list of steps to reverse meal planning, but there’s honestly only one 🤷. The point of reverse meal planning is where you start: with the food you already have (or with what you can buy on sale, if you follow a more traditional view of it). When I go to meal plan each week, I start with what’s already in my deep freeze, fridge freezer, fridge, and pantry shelf. I pick a few items from each I want to use this week, then plan for recipes that use those. I usually try to pick one thing from each shelf or section. This is vastly different from how I planned in the early days of our marriage, when I would pour over cookbooks looking for new recipes to try. New recipes are great! But if they require twenty new ingredients to make, then you aren’t going to be saving money on your grocery bill.

Some tips to make this work:

1. Don’t try to use everything you have up in one week. This isn’t a pantry challenge where you’re trying to not buy anything. The idea is just to be more mindful of what you have so it gets used up before it goes bad. 

2. This lends itself well to any style of grocery shopping. This works great if you shop at a big box store for part of your groceries. I feel confident buying the big packs of spaghetti sauce or canned green beans or cartons of chicken broth at Sam’s Club because I KNOW I’ll be incorporating them in my meal planning in the months to come. Sometimes I envision myself having to cook with that ingredient for the next three months. If I inwardly cringe, then it’s probably not a good purchase. It also lends itself well to shopping sales. I personally don’t shop the sales at a lot of stores, but I do try to fill in the gaps in my meal plan each week with what’s on sale at Aldi. I usually buy whatever fruit is on sale, and if I don't end up with enough breakfasts, lunches, snacks, or sides from what I have on hand, then I’ll buy the things that are on sale that week. But if you are more of a “shop the sales and stock up” kind of person, then you will definitely find this meal planning method to work for you (again, check out the resources I’ve listed above). I’ve also used this method when I exclusively got my groceries through Wal-Mart pickup, and it still worked great. So embrace the freedom to grocery shop however works best for your family!

3. Pay attention to the things that are hard to use up. Sometimes I’ll find an ingredient making its way on to my meal plan week after week, but I’ll avoid actually cooking with it. Or I’ll find myself throwing away something that went bad before I could use it up. These are red flags to me to stop buying that ingredient. Or at the very least, buy less of it. 

4. Choose your actual meals based on what that week looks like. Sometimes I open my freezer and see lots of ground beef and decide to try a new recipe or two with it. Sometimes I recognize it’s going to be a crazy week and I decide to stick with tacos and spaghetti. Just because you’re focused on the ingredients you have, doesn’t mean you have to get fancy and make lots of new ingredients. I like to lean into my mood with this: am I feeling creative and want to try something new? Or am I exhausted and just need tried-and-true this week?

5. Don’t feel defeated if it takes you a while to get the hang of this. It took me a solid month or two before I felt like this method was really working for our family. You’ll probably need to tweak how you’re doing things until you find the right combination for your current season of life. Don’t feel like you need to follow my method or anyone else’s exactly; instead, give yourself time to experiment and make it your own.

Finally, I want to remind you that it’s okay to stick with simple meals if that’s the season you’re in; the important thing is to provide food for your family, and don’t feel guilty about how you go about it!