There are plenty of smartphone apps that can help you create grocery lists and track what you have in the fridge.

by April Lisante

When it comes time each year to make my New Year’s Resolutions, I tend to gravitate toward the obvious ones, with all the best intentions.

Losing weight and getting healthier through more exercise are my typical go-to promises.

But this year, when I was asked to think about a resolution that means a lot to me, the first thing that popped into my head was to get more organized with my family’s meal plan. I don’t mean making sure we have dinner at 6 p.m. on the dot every night or packing healthier lunches for the kids. Instead, I mean a complete overhaul of how I shop for groceries, what I spend, how I plan weekly meals and how I waste food.

What spurred this need to refresh my repertoire? Well it wasn’t seeing Pinterest feeds with perfectly organized pantries, and it wasn’t a sudden urge to try new recipes. It was even simpler. I’ve noticed that when it comes time to clean out the fridge every week, I am throwing out so much wasted food from dinners where I cooked too much, half-eaten takeout pizza, Chipotle containers or simply items that I bought, like that head of cauliflower that got buried and I failed to use quickly enough.

It’s a waste of food and money. I see my church looking for pantry donations at this time of year. Not wasting food is my resolution. I’ve also heard the same thing again and again from my friends who work at home, work out of the home or are just super busy at home with children. Everyone is busy. That is a given. Wasting food is not good. That is also a given.

I thought of my Italian grandmother, who conformed to the American ways and used to give us cereal in the morning. If we didn’t drink the milk from the bottom of the bowl, she looked at us as if we were about to leave for school in a Lamborghini.

“Why are you wasting the milk?” she’d say.

An extreme example, but one I took into adulthood with a lasting lesson. Why waste?

I tried to dissect the problem and came up with a few areas where I was dropping the ball. I tested my resolution for a week before writing this story, and here’s what I learned.

The first is the most important: I don’t go to the grocery store with a list. I kind of meander in there on a Sunday during an Eagles game when it quiets down so I can wander the aisles and grab whatever I think we need. I end up trying to plan meals in my head but end up grabbing too much. I can’t say how many times I grabbed pasta and came home to find I had it already. Or Nutella, but oops, there was an unopened jar already in the pantry.

So that was the first place I needed to improve. I downloaded a grocery list app to help me stay on track. There are tons of options out there in the app stores, like Yummly, which uses ingredients you have to create a recipe or simply keeps a list for you. There’s Mealtime, which lets you plan a week’s worth of meals. But I opted to download AnyList. It had great reviews and promised to organize the groceries into categories.

I loved it. I entered each item and it automatically got categorized so I could grab everything at once from that department. I stuck to my list and, though I was tempted, didn’t diverge.

Once I have groceries, my next problem emerges: using them in a smart way to make planned meals. And here, I don’t just mean saying “Monday is pasta day, Tuesday is roasted chicken, etc.” I mean making sure that I pre-portion the meals in the freezer or refrigerator so that I’m not making too much and wasting the leftovers.

Let’s be honest, if you made twice the amount of chicken and broccoli than you needed, you might have all the best intentions of tackling those Ziploc bags the next night, but they magically don’t reappear until the following week in the back of the fridge. Trust me. That’s when my guilt sets in.

To solve this dilemma, I prepackaged chicken cutlets in individual freezer bags, took the vegetables I bought, removed them from the larger bags and made individual portions in Ziplocs. I even butterfly-cut a roasting chicken in half and froze one half, using only the other half for a meal.

The third problem I run into when the craziness of the weeknight bears down upon me? I haven’t planned or started dinner, so I break down and order pizzas and hoagies. Picture it: 7 p.m., husband working late, kids playing Fortnite talking to me with headphones on, saying they are hungry. OK. Pizza or Primo’s it is. That’s usually a mistake.

That one night of ordering out is a nice chunk of my weekly grocery budget. It’s not smart. If I do that twice in one week, it’s even worse. I have friends who thought services like Blue Apron would solve the meal planning problem, but they realized they still had to cook after a long day, and that one dinner costs about $50, give or take.

So I sat down on a Sunday and made a list of all the dinners I was going to make for the next seven days. Then, I made sure the meats were frozen in portioned servings. For example, I put four chicken breasts in a package. Then I set aside which veggies I would use, and finally, I designated a starch for each meal. For example, one box of cous cous for Monday, rice on Tuesday, etc. That morning, I took the meat out of the freezer and put my dry ingredients and spices on the counter to save time at night. For a week, it actually worked.

Now all I have to do is keep this going for another 52 weeks. Happy 2020!