Grocery Capsule Recap

If you have been following along, I posted a month ago about my desire to simplify our eating habits. One of our family’s biggest struggles is deciding what’s for dinner. I am sure a lot of families can relate. When I’m at work all day, I’m making hundreds of decisions for patients – the last decision I want to have to make at the end of the day is dinner plans. Of course I have tried to make this Bryan’s job but he equally hates making plans for us for dinner so oftentimes it’s just a complete fail on both ends. So, we tried out my grocery capsule idea last month. Here’s our recap.

I do not enjoy grocery shopping and meal planning in general. Anything I can do to simplify this for our family is ideal. So, last month I started thinking about meals that we routinely eat and set up a meal plan for the month of January. You can read more about this here. But essentially, I picked 10 meals and assigned them to specific days in January. I assumed we would eat at home 6 nights a week and reserved 1 meal a week for dining out or takeout. 

Ok, so to recap our month, full disclosure, we kind of failed. We made it through the first 10 days I would say – no problem. Then, we ran into issues with having too many leftovers in the fridge. So, we skipped a few planned meals in an effort to not waste any food. I am not going to feel guilty about that though – obviously we didn’t want to let things go to waste! 

However, I guess I should rephrase.  I don’t think it was a complete failure. I felt overall less stressed for the month about our plans for dinner. We didn’t increase our eating out. We really only ate out once a week. There was one week when Bryan was home alone with the kids and ordered pizza. Grocery shopping was also much less stressful for me. It was easy to just quickly look at our plan for the week and make a list around those meals. We might not have made all of them as scheduled, but luckily I didn’t feel like a ton of food had to be thrown out as a result of that. 

So, will this grocery capsule be something we continue with next month? Well, I think I’m going to tweak it slightly but will have the same general principles. Because we ran into issues with leftovers, I think we can avoid that by only having 5 listed meals per week. Then I will still plan for 1 night out for dinner and 1 night for leftovers or a free for all. 

I am going to make a February calendar similar to January’s and keep it in our fridge. We were pretty consistent with certain meals and didn’t mind having the same thing every Monday for example. I think I’ll keep that the same as well. I’m mostly just excited to have a general blueprint for the month.

What do you think? Ready to set up a grocery capsule for your family? Let me know your thoughts below!