When you’ve begun to fend for yourself, with no parents to have all your meals ready for you, trying to figure out what eat each day can be a difficult task to manage. When I first moved out it was one of the biggest adjustments I had to get used to. The daily struggles of:
Thinking of what to make
Learning to cook
Making sure I had ingredients in the fridge/pantry to actually make something to eat
Remembering to take the meat out of the freezer so that it will be defrosted and usable by dinner time
Being able to feed yourself is one of the most fundamental things about learning to adult, but if you don’t set out a plan, it can be the biggest chore. You can always eat out, but doing that every day can get very expensive, especially if you’ve got a mortgage or rent and bills to pay.
I live in a household where we take turns making dinner. My sister, who lives with me, cooks for one night, we may allocate a night to eat out or have outings with friends, and the rest of the week myself or my hubs will cook. For a good while, as we were learning to be independent, we would often come home with no meat out to cook with or make half-baked meals because we would be missing ingredients from recipes we would want to make.
Since then, I’ve adopted the practice of meal planning and findings systems to better manage meals and shopping lists. It’s seriously made daily life so much easier and one less thing to deal with.
Simple meal plans on Keep
Weekly meal plan
Each week before the grocery run, usually the Saturday morning, I would plan out what to make for each day. Since I want it to be collaborative, I just have a note on Google Keep. The good thing about it is:
All household members have access to it so they know what we're having
Writing it down allows you to plan for a varied diet throughout the week, so you're not having the same thing over and over
I don't have to remember anything
I can just refer to it in the morning to see what meat I need to put out to defrost without having to think
When you put in a URL in Google Keep, it even creates a little quicklink for you
It becomes the main input for your grocery shopping list
It's so simple, but that 20 minutes of putting together a list for the week saves you so much time compared to having to think about it multiple times throughout the week.
Protip: Learn some signature dishes and have a bookmark folder of all your go to recipes that you can cycle through.
Shopping lists
Now that you have your meal plan, you can create your shopping list. I previously also used Keep for our shopping lists which is fine if you want to a simple checklist. However, I wanted to take it a step further and wanted a way to keep track of my home inventory: to know what's in my fridge, freezer and pantry so that if I came across something at the shops, I can know if I already have it or not, without having to go back home and check.
I had considered Excel, but it’s not that easy to add/remove/rearrange between columns. After seeing what other tools I had available, I resolved that Trello would best work since it's got the simple drag and drop feature. It's easily been one of my best life hacks since moving out.
Here's how I use Trello to track our home inventory:
Set up your columns/lists. I use: Shopping list, Fridge, Freezer, Panty & Bulk supply
Go through your fridge etc. and create cards for every item you have. This initial set up can be time consuming but it's well worth it!
Add any ingredients or items to your shopping list based on your meal plan
When things run out and it's something you want to replace, just drag and drop it into your shopping list column
When you're doing the grocery shopping and have your shopping list out, drag and drop items that go into your cart back into the list of where it's going to be stored.
If you purchase anything that's not on the list and it's not already in your inventory, just create a new card for it.
Simple, but effective.
Since Trello is also collaborative, anyone can add to the shopping list or do the shopping.
Protip: If you want to take it further, Trello has other functionality than you can utilise like colour coding and due dates if you wanted to label items into categories like "running low" or put down expiry dates on your perishables. You can even put pictures of your items if you wanted to.
Create your shopping list by drag and dropping from other lists, and then put them in your inventory once purchased.
Efficient shopping
If you hate grocery shopping and want to get it done as fast as possible, this method can allow you to do a whole weeks worth of groceries and get out within 20 minutes.
Memorise where things are in your local supermarket. We shop at Aldi and since they only have the essentials and we're not having to worry about all the different brands, there are a lot less aisles so you learn to remember where everything is.
Order your shopping list items based on where you will find them in the store. This way you just have to move in one direction and work your way down the list systematically from top to bottom.
Stick to the list. Go in only for what you need and don't waste time browsing. Sticking to the list also helps you manage your spending.
When it comes to the checkout, have your reusable shopping bags open and ready in your trolley. We use the cooler bag versions since they have a nice square base and more rigid so that it can stand upright, they hold quite a lot and can zip up so your shopping doesn't fall out.
Put heavy items, like cans and liquids, first on the conveyer belt and soft things like fruits and vegetables and bread last. This ensures that the more solid items go first into the base of the shopping bags, and the fragile items don't get squished.
Protip: Try to even out your heavy items across the different bags so you have even weight distribution between all the bags. It also creates a solid base for each bag so that your groceries will remain upright when in the car.
Hope you find these adulting tips useful. Let me know if you do try them out, and if you have any tips of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.
