The Johnson Crew!

Homeschooling is back in full swing and our days can get quite full am I right one of the last things I want to do is have to think about what's going to be for dinner tonight so today I'm sharing with you how I avoid that kind of burnout by doing meal planning every week and gonna be sharing with you some of our yummy easy favorite go-to meals at the end of this video so stay tuned okay quick tiny little back story I used to think that meal planning was

So silly I used to think how could you know what you're going to want for dinner each night like you don't know what you're going to be craving so let's just like fly by the seat of our pants and we'll just decide what we want that night and that worked for a little while like before we had kids and then as we had more kids and things got busier I was like this is not working this is very difficult so finally decided to give meal planning a try I don't know why I dug my heels in over that I don't know sometimes we're stubborn over things that we shouldn't be

And so gave it a try and I will never go back to not meal planning it has saved me so much because goodness by the time dinner gets here like the last thing that we have brain power to do is come up with a great meal that everyone's gonna love and then the most disheartening thing is to go and look in your fridge and go I don't have anything to make anything so to avoid all of that meal planning is the answer and it's great

And it not only saves you in those ways but it saves you money yes because obviously if you didn't have anything in the house one of the things you're most likely going to do is just let's just go out to eat let's just go deep or pick up fast food or pick a pizza whatever so this saves you from having to fall back on that and it's typically healthier to eat at home too rather than eating out so all good reasons to give meal planning a try this video is actually part of a collaboration hosted by trisha over at the homeschool break room

And she is a homeschool mom with over 10 years of homeschool experience so definitely go and check out her channel and all her wisdom I'm going to leave a link below to the playlist that's filled with several other homeschool moms sharing their meal planning strategies and their favorite meals with you as well so I meal plan one week at a time grocery shop for one week at a time and I do this every monday the reason I picked this day and this will be important for you to figure out what works good for your schedule is that we have extracurriculars that my kids do on tuesday nights

So it's very convenient to swing by the walmart on our way back home because it's on the way to pick up our grocery order I do order our groceries I love it even if I didn't have the kids with me it's just an errand I don't really want to have to run so grocery order is like my lifesaver it's so great you can just like sit on your couch and jammies have a show on in the background and be doing your grocery ordering it's great I will say I will say over the years I mean we've been doing this for six plus years there have been days where like they have taken a long time to bring out our order or they were missing

Key things or the substitutes weren't that great there have been issues with it I will say that but on the whole overall it's been a mostly good experience and it has saved me so much time and I feel like a lot of people say it saves them money too because you're not doing the impulse buying that you would do if you were walking up and down the grocery aisles like being tempted by different things so it kind of helps you stick to your list better we have tried different grocery stores I never used to grocery shop at walmart like I really don't like shopping in their store

But they typically have cheaper prices than all the other grocery stores and so I was like well let me if I could just order online let me give walmart a try and it's been great so now I get the benefit of their lower prices and get to do the ordering online thing so it's kind of the best of both worlds if you have tried them before and didn't have a good experience again it could be the management at the time the staff at the time there's all kinds of variables

So maybe give the different grocery stores another chance see how it goes but it has saved me a lot of headache and a lot of time and I love it okay that's the end of that so the first thing that I do is I look at my weekly schedule all right what do we have going on this week what nights do my kids have extracurricular activities because those are always at dinner time right like it's a very inconvenient time and so what I like to do is make a bigger meal the night before

And then take the leftovers with us to their extracurriculars the next day and we will put them in these little containers you have these like meal prepper containers they work great so that's awesome you know are we gonna have friends over any night this week what nights will my husband be working he's a wedding photographer so he may be eating at the wedding or he may be shooting a family session and is going to get home late and so it's going to need to be a meal that he can reheat things like that those are all the things I'm thinking about because certainly if there's a night that he's not going to be eating here I'm going to do something real easy or something

That maybe he doesn't like but I do like see convenient those are the things I'm thinking about before making my meal plan and then I open up the evernote app if you have not heard of this before it's kind of like a souped-up version of the notes app it's got better like filing organization and things like that it just has more robust features so I prefer it basically you can have the app on your computer and on your phone and they sync up and that's a really nice feature what I'll do is I have one note that has all of our menus for like all of time

And so I'll just type in the days of the week and then start filling out what we want to have for dinner each night but what's nice about this is that I don't have to sit there and reinvent the wheel every time I can scroll back through previous weeks and see what meals we want to have this week oh that's a great idea they loved this one or whatever and so that helps me a lot I can just literally copy and paste the meal and stick it into this week's menu

So that is very helpful and then once I have my menu planned out then I can go and open up my browser and make my grocery order one last thing that I will say about the walmart grocery ordering site is that once it gets to know the things that you typically purchase week after week it will suggest those things to you before you check out so it's a great way for me to be able to not have to like think too hard about my grocery list most of it's already done for me

And I'm just sort of clicking through that list and adding the essentials that we get every week that's a nice feature okay so that is how I meal plan now let's talk about three of our favorite go-to meals that are yummy and easy and fairly quick number one is steak fajitas now this is great for leftovers but it's also really great if you're going to be having guests over it's just I feel like a fun meal when you have people over to be like everybody's kind of making their own different kind of fajita putting on whatever toppings they prefer I just like that kind of thing for having guests over we get this really thin steak that's like in the mid-range price it's not

Very expensive and then cut that up into strips and it literally takes like one minute to cook on the stovetop because it's already so thin and then we'll cook up onions and peppers for me my husband sometimes we'll make guacamole and then of course have like the normal topping sour cream and cheese and then if we have more time we can do like corn on the cob or if you're in a hurry canned corn goes great easy peasy meal number two baked barbecue thighs I just line a casserole dish with parchment paper

And put my thighs on there and then season them with salt and pepper and garlic powder and I pop them in the oven at 425 degrees 12 minutes then I flip them over and bake them for another 12 minutes and then they're done and then I cut them up because of course my kids need them cut up anyways throw them in a bowl douse them in barbecue sauce mix them up and they are ready to be served meal number three pork tenderloin now you can use a crock pot for this

But if you haven't heard of a sous-vide before I'll leave a link below this thing is awesome and it's it's the same kind of concept as a crock pot where you're cooking something for a really long time and you just kind of set it and forget it so for pork tenderloin it actually tastes best if you make it 24 hours before you're gonna eat it so we can prepare this the night before where we're not rushing around and then it'll be ready to eat by the next day

And I didn't have to do anything in between all we're having to do is season the pork tenderloin itself seal it in a freezer bag and then vacuum seal it and I'll leave a link to this little system that we use below and then we fill up this cooler with water and we just keep it filled up in our garage and you just drop it right in there and you set the temperature on the sous-vide the sous-vide heats up that water and keeps it at that hot temperature the whole time you have it on

And it just cooks it to perfection to perfection it's so good it's so moist and so tender we take the juice from the bag and you can make gravy from this and it is so delicious on top and then for our sides I like to make mashed cauliflower and the gravy is fantastic on that as well I just steam a bag of cauliflower and then blend it up in the blender and add butter and garlic powder and salt and some milk and it's so good

And then I got a bagged caesar salad super quick and easy and all of these flavors go really nice together definitely go and check out my other dinner ideas video it has recipes that are easy enough for your kids to help you with if you want to do that but they're more of our go-to recipes I'll put that up at the end of this video so you can check that one out next hopefully your family will love these different meals and it will make your life easier to add these to your menu for the week

And hopefully the meal planning will make your life a lot easier as well if any of you have other tips on how you meal plan or grocery shop or whatever different meals that your family loves that are easy definitely leave those things for us in the comments below that's the great thing about this community is that we can all share with each other so thank you thank you so much always appreciate the conversation with y'all if you've enjoyed this type of video give it a thumbs up

And if you're new here my channel is all about homeschooling and life as a family of six so if that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button below and catch me here every week hope you guys have an amazing day and an awesome school year and I'll see you in the next video bye