The Divorced Dadvocate: Divorce Support For Dads
Dads face unique issues during and after divorce. We identify and address the issues relevant to divorced/divorcing dads and create an action plan to survive and thrive!
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The Divorced Dadvocate: Divorce Support For Dads
239 - REPLAY: Practical Advice: Divorced Dads Meal Planning
Dads navigating back-to-school chaos find valuable insights on meal planning and preparation in this episode. We discuss practical strategies, involve kids in cooking, and offer tips to make grocery shopping easier and more enjoyable.
• Importance of meal planning for divorced dads
• Overcoming challenges in meal preparation
• Tips for effective meal planning and organization
• Benefits of batch cooking and freezing meals
• Utilizing recipe planning tools for convenience
• Creating and adhering to a grocery list
• Managing grocery shopping solo for efficiency
• Engaging kids in meal planning and cooking
• Affordable grocery shopping tips for saving money
• Exploring grocery store loyalty programs and meal kit services
• Simple steps to get started with meal prep
• Emphasis on teaching kids valuable cooking skills
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Hello and welcome to the Divorced Dadvocate, where we help dads create a healthier and a less traumatic divorce. My name is Jude Sandvall, I am your host and today we are going to have another edition of Practical Advice and we're going to be talking about with the kids going back to school. My kids are back to school this next week and I know that kids across the country and the world are going back to school this next week and I know that kids across the country and the world are going back to school. So we're going to talk about meal planning and meal prep for divorced dads, which sometimes especially if you are newly separated or divorced that can sometimes be a little bit of a challenge. I know it was for me getting used to it, but it's definitely doable. But before we jump into that, let me just remind you if you've not checked out the divorce quiz on the website yet, it is awesome. We've been getting a ton of people taking it. It is a tool that will help you kind of assess where you're at in the divorce process compared to other people that have gone through divorce, and it just spits out five, six different categories that you may be going through and helps you do a little self-assessment. So go to thedivorcedadvocatecom and click on divorce quiz. It's an awesome tool. Also, we've got some workshops and classes coming up. Check out the website, or divorceddadsfreshstartcom that's the workshop we've got every week now, and then dadsdivorceblueprintcom August 22nd. We've got a new class starting then, so check those out.
Speaker 1:All right Now I don't know about you, but with work and getting kids back and forth to school and extracurricular activities and everything else that we've got going on, sometimes planning meals, I really even just simply forget. I'll be completely honest, but for the most part, I try to do a really good job in planning out my weeks for meal prep and meal purchase and meal planning, and so we're going to talk today about some tips for helping you go through that, especially if you're new at doing this and it used to be the traditional family and you had somebody that you were working together with and grocery shopping with, or they did the grocery shopping and you did the prep, or maybe you didn't do any of it. This can be just somewhat overwhelming at the start, but, trust me, it just takes a little bit of planning and you can be highly effective. And actually I've talked to many men, so I used to work in restaurants. I really love to cook and so cooking is just something that's fun and enjoyable to me. Lots of men have not done it before and haven't liked to do it before, but I've talked to many who got into it and started to do it and really started to enjoy it. So it can be something that can be creative and fun, depending upon the time that you take in developing your cooking skills, just like anything else, and developing a plan to prep for what it is that you're cooking and your meal planning. So it can be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:The other challenge is some grocery store shopping. Right, some people hate it. I, for whatever weird reason I know this is a weird quirk that I have, because everybody tells me that I really don't mind grocery shopping and I actually spend several like. I probably hit the grocery store at least three times, three times a week. I try to buy everything fresh and not freeze anything. So I spend a little bit more time and I put a little bit more time into my schedule for for doing that. So it's not as big of a deal. It's when you can start getting rushed and you don't have time. That's when it gets stressful. So what we're going to talk about today is ways to make this easier, make it not stressful, because we don't want to be working up in the morning stressing about getting breakfast and lunches made and getting kids off and then coming home and having to cook. You just start to feel sometimes like maybe a short order cook or a maid, and I feel your pain. I know how that is.
Speaker 1:So let's talk first about tips for the actual meal planning, and what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to really take the time to spend a half hour or so planning out your week of meals, and I typically will do this on a Sunday sometime. My Sundays are usually pretty casual, so I plan a time where I'm going to sit and I'm going to think about and strategize. So you want to strategize what it is that you're going to be preparing for the week Now, depending upon what your schedule might be. Some might be on a 5-2-2-5, some might be a week on week off. You might have the kids just on the weekend, so you might going to maybe have to plan for that next weekend Friday through Sunday. So, depending upon what it is looking like then, you're going to want to plan for that, and you want to plan in terms of recipes, in terms of dishes, or what you're going to cook or what you're going to serve, instead of just thinking about one-off items like, oh, I'm going to cook chicken, or I'm going to cook a pizza, or whatever it might be. So you want to think about what it is of the recipe and the dish that you're going to plan, and so why that makes it easier is then what you can do from there is you can prepare a list of what you want, and I highly suggest trying to do batches of stuff. So batches of maybe red beans and rice is a good one, spaghetti sauce is a good one.
Speaker 1:Soups I love soups. Sundays, in the winters, I will cook batches of soups or chilies, and you can have a lot of that and you can freeze some of it. You can eat some of it right away and you can freeze some, or you can freeze all of it in portions and then take it out as you go, and then you can build up just kind of a quantity. So sometimes, if I'm doing that, particularly during the winter time, I can build up for those days that I just have. Like I said, I've forgotten to plan something and I can pull out a chili or some spaghetti sauce and make some spaghetti real quick, so you can build up in your freezer some of those large batches that you've portioned down to pull out in case of an emergency. Yeah, so the next step is you want to create a list for when you are going to the grocery store, and we're going to talk about strategies in going to the grocery store too.
Speaker 1:But let me just also add if you're not good at planning recipes, there are options out there for you to get online in their recipe builders. There's a site called the Dinner Daily, and so they'll help you plan meals around your grocery store and their weekly flyers, which is really cool because you can find those discounts on food items. There's also another one called the $5mealplancom. It's $5mealplancom, and they'll also give you recipes as well, and it's recipes, unlike recipes that you find when you just Google a recipe for something and they come up with all of these exotic things that you need to be hunting all over at different grocery stores for which, like you know, you can't be doing that. It's just a giant pain. So it's with normal, everyday ingredients that will that you'll be able to easily find in the grocery stores. You're going up and down the aisles or you're in the produce section, so it makes it a lot easier. So if you're really really new to this, maybe look and subscribe to one of those and they'll help you spit out some different recipes and then from that recipe you can take and you can make your list.
Speaker 1:And you can make a list. Always, always make a list and try to stick to that list. Then this is going to help in the finance department. Stick to that list when you go to the grocery store and we'll talk about tips on saving money when you go to the grocery store in just a bit too. But those recipe sites will help you to formulate that list and then when you get to the grocery store you have your list. Now, if you're really super duper prepared which I am never that super duper prepared every week you can formulate that list based on the aisles.
Speaker 1:If you know your grocery store well enough or after many years, like it is now that I've been doing this on my own, you kind of get to know your grocery store and you know the aisles, you can base your list and you can section off your list and sort it by aisle so that you can just be effective when you're going into the store and you can get in and out. Now I can't do that. I always end up going oh man, I forgot I needed this. It was on my list, but I didn't look at my list and I went past that aisle and I got to go back down to produce and I got to go back down to the freezer section or to the dairy section or to whatever section. So I end up just like going back and forth to in the grocery store. But that's okay with me. Like I said, I don't mind being there as much.
Speaker 1:But here's a good tip too when you are going to the grocery store, especially in the beginning, if you're just getting used to doing this grocery shopping prepping thing and it's a little overwhelming try to do it when you're alone and not with the kids, especially if you have little kiddos. So when I got divorced, my kids were six, four and two. So, as you can imagine, three little ones in the grocery store can be incredibly, incredibly challenging. So if you can schedule this around times where they are maybe at you know with their mother, that would be good. Or maybe during school if you have time when they're at school, depending on what year hours are or if they're a little bit older, they have after school activities Oftentimes. So if I'm not little bit older, they have after school activities Oftentimes.
Speaker 1:So if I'm not doing it on the weekend and I'm doing it during the week, if I've got a time where it's just an hour, maybe they're at an activity I'm dropping them off at one of their activities. I've got an hour that I would otherwise be having to kill or just drive back home, and then by the time I get home I got to drive back and pick them up again. I will try to schedule my time to go to the grocery store in that maybe 45 minutes or an hour, which is about the perfect time that it takes me to get through the grocery store about 45 minutes to an hour max, especially if I have my list and I know my stores now, or I know my one particular store that I like to go to. So that's about the max that it takes me to get through. So go alone if you can, especially in the beginning, and then that also avoids all the nasty little secrets tactics that the grocery stores implement on you and the kids, which is putting all the colorful cereals and stuff at the bottom and all that merchandising in order to get you and the kids to be looking at this and that, and it avoids all the can we get this, can we get that, et cetera. So if you can do that, especially at the start, that's great. If not, I highly suggest and I did this because it wasn't possible for me to, I didn't really have time when they were younger so I always took them to the grocery store and so I got them involved in helping do stuff, because they all really liked to pick out the different things that we were going to eat.
Speaker 1:And I even got them involved in the meal planning, the recipe planning, early and we would pick and this happened probably when they were about six, eight and 10, each one of them would pick one dinner a night that they were going to be responsible for planning and they came up with the recipe and we even bought a recipe, a kid's recipe book. So they came up with really cool and fun different recipes, like mac and cheese with a hot dog for the protein in it, and the hot dog was cut up a special way, like an octopus with mustard as the eyes. It was really cool. They had a lot of fun prepping that and it was easy stuff like a Mac and cheese and hot dogs. They could help prepare that. But then they even got to get a little more creative. They started making stuff like lasagna, because they love to make the lasagna, boil the noodles and then put it all together and build it. It's almost like a little science project for them building that and then cooking it and then eating it. And lasagna is one of those big batch things. Then you can portion out and you can freeze and have for later. So getting them involved was really a good thing for me. I really enjoyed it and they really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:The other thing it assisted in doing was teaching them how to look and buy things. So I'd explain to them how things were priced and how to look at the different prices on things, how some things were generic labeled with the grocery stores and how some of them were retail labeled just with the regular ones and some of them they'd recognize from seeing on advertisements and I'd explain well, there's this also the generic version. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not. Sometimes you got to try it. And then we started talking about as we ate, healthier and more organic stuff there's organic options and what that meant. So it was really an educational process for them.
Speaker 1:So now my daughter's being older, they can go into the grocery store and they can look and they can find the best deal on something. And we've even taken it now to the next level, which is the grocery shopping challenge. I don't know if any of you have seen that TV show where people will go in and they're shopping and the challenge is to find all of the stuff as quickly as possible through the grocery store. So we've even done some fun days where we will split up the grocery list in teams and there's four of us, so it'll be two and two. We'll each get a cart and then we take off and then we're going and seeing who can find the items the quickest and then meet at the front Now and actually after that I review that we got everything and make sure that we got everything and it's the appropriate stuff, et cetera. But it makes it kind of fun and it it just mixes stuff up a little bit. So those are a few different fun ways that you can get the job done at the grocery store, even if you have the kids there, and it keeps them occupied and maybe having a little fun too.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about some tips for more affordable grocery shopping. Okay, um, the first one would be um, join your grocery stores reward program. So this, uh, this used to be not as economical or not as helpful, but now, with all of the electronic awards apps that they have out there like my grocery store has one, and I can literally you don't have to coupon clip, you don't have to do anything. Um, that used to be a big thing, the coupon clipping, and I don't know about you, but that's a ginormous pain in the butt. But the app is, and the one that I have for my grocery store chain is you just go in and you can click it electronically on your app and then, once you type in your number in the store, it applies it automatically. So if I see something on the app that I need for that that I put on my list for that week, it just automatically takes the discount off of it, which is incredibly, incredibly helpful.
Speaker 1:Another one, and this is a really fantastic one, and I got to admit I have not done this, but thinking about the thought process behind it makes perfect sense and that is bring cash to pay for your groceries. And that is because if you bring a 100, like, for instance, you bring a $100 bill and you know that that is what you have budgeted for groceries that week, then you will not go over and you will not. You know, you will stay true to that budget and not be just tossing things into the cart that you see as you walk down that aisle and fall into that trap I was talking about with the merchandising and like, oh, look at this end cap, I like that, let's try this. Or what is this. Or look at this display. It will keep you on your budget much better because you have that dollar amount set and you have that with you and you cannot exceed that. So I think that's a great one. Another one is shop for's a. That's a. That's a great one.
Speaker 1:And my daughter, my, uh, my youngest, just asked this this week about zucchini and I have totally space and apparently she loves zucchini now and we like to saute zucchini. So if you shop for it in season, then it's going to be less expensive and then that also helps you keep a variety of different recipes going like, uh, the zucchinis and squashes and stuff, and then that also helps you keep a variety of different recipes going like the zucchinis and squashes and stuff, and you can do the sauteed stuff like that, you can grill them as well. Then that gives you the opportunity to just mix it up a little bit, because we're going to talk about strategies for mixing up a little bit here too. I kind of get into my same old routine of the same stuff A lot of meats, a lot of vegetables, all kind of a rotation, and that's also why I engaged my daughters in picking up their stuff.
Speaker 1:So you started to hear a complaint oh, chicken again, dad. I said, okay, well, great, you don't want to have chicken. So why don't you come up with a solution to something different? You'd like on that day that you are going to be preparing the dinner, and so not only to help them think about something different than it was chicken in our case, apparently I like chicken a lot. I do like chicken, and you know. But then it's also helped them to see that it's not. It's not that easy to figure this stuff out. So you know, we can make it look like we're super dads a lot of the time because we're prepping this stuff and we're, you know, we're pulling off breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day. But when they need to just think about one meal a week and they need need to prep that and they need to look for it at the grocery store and then come home and they need to prepare it that night together and then serve it, it really gives them an appreciation of this whole process. Little to no complaining anymore, because they did have an appreciation for being able to do that whole process and only having to do it once and not having to do it seven days a week or however many weekdays. Well, seven days a week, they are eating seven days a week, so, whether they're with me or with their mom.
Speaker 1:So another tip is stock up on basic ingredients like flour or sugar or anything else that's peanut butter, some of those staples that you might have when they go on sale. If there's a good sale, maybe buy two or three of them, if it's within your budget, and stock them up. Either freeze them or, you know, at my old house I built shelves and shelving. Now, with the advent of Costco, sam's Club, some of the big stores where you can buy in massive bulk. You can do that and that helps out as well in buying bulk.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I don't have as much space at my place and I also try to buy fresh as much as possible and not freeze, especially any meats anymore. So that's why I'm doing more grocery stores. There's nothing wrong with it. You just got to have the space and the place to store it, freezers as well as shelving All right. So if you absolutely loathe going into the grocery store and I've got a friend who absolutely loathes going to the grocery store and he's not prepared enough and organized enough so he actually hires somebody to go into the grocery store but not all of us have that disposable income and ability to hire somebody to go do our grocery store shopping for us. But there are a lot of us that do loathe going to the grocery store. So there are two options now with the advent of and especially after all this COVID stuff, and that is doing curbside pickup or having the groceries delivered directly to your door.
Speaker 1:Now I was an early adopter of the delivery stuff and when they started it it was just absolutely atrocious and it was a train wreck and they got stuff wrong and they forgot stuff and it never came on time and then it was all seemed warm and nasty and so it was not good. So I didn't do it for a long time and I've gone back since to trying it and a lot of them have a really good services now for doing that. Now, my only challenge in what I don't like is two things is that if they don't have something, they're just going to replace it with something else, and I don't necessarily like that, because I'm a little particular about what I'm buying and what I want and ingredients. And the other thing is I really like to find deals and find sales. So that's why I go to the store and that's why I don't use this. So I like to find what's good and I like to look at the product too before I'm buying it. So if you're as picky as I am, that might be a little bit more challenging. But you can still do that with the curbside if you're going to check the groceries before you take them home and see if that's that's going to work. But those are two options. If you absolutely do not want to, uh, to step foot into, uh, the grocery store and so, um, let's see here.
Speaker 1:Um, now, meal delivery services. Okay, so let's talk about now. We talked about the grocery delivery from the grocery store Chef. Some of those ones are meal delivery services. Now, these are really cool for several reasons. One is they will prep the portions for you and create meal kits specifically for you. So if you have a family of four, you say I have a family of four and I need meals, I need dinners for four days this week, and they will prep stuff in easy to prepare this. So they'll have it prepped and ready for an easy for you to prepare for dinner in a very short period of time. So instead of having to pull out the meats and the vegetables and maybe a starch and start cooking that and boiling the rice or the potatoes or baking them and then cutting up the vegetables and steaming them and then having planned to marinate the meat and then grill that, it all comes in a prepared, pre-prepared kit and you're going to pull that out. It's got specific step-by-step instructions makes it incredibly easy for you to pull out. This is really helpful if you're not very skilled or very organized very skilled or very organized and it can help you kind of bridge that gap for the time being, if you want to learn some more skills and do that so you can get these prepared meal kit delivery services. And it is also really easy to include the kids in doing that too, because it's so easy and so step by step.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that really helps with this, or this helps with, is that it will mix things up a little bit. Like I said, I kind of get stagnant. So they have all these different options out there and if you order the different stuff, you know it gives you a lot of options and a lot of you know you can just you're probably never, ever going to be at a loss and you're probably never going to hear that complaint, like the chicken complaint, that there's not. You know that it's the same stuff over and over because they have so many myriad of options. Now, the only drawback is they are much more expensive. So you're paying for the time. You know time is money, right, so you're paying for them to put that menu together, that recipe together, pre-prepare it, get it all ready for you and have it all set there. Now here's one thing, though that is a tip If you don't want to have that delivered and you want to save a little bit of money and you still want to have that meal kit service.
Speaker 1:Some of the grocery stores now are selling some of those in store. So if you go and you look and I find them at the kind of around the deli sections and the deli aisles they'll have some. They're not huge, huge selections, but they do have some of those and these are good ones too. If you want to buy, you want to freeze and you want to stock up on those, and you can. This is as simple as if you want to go and you want to prepare that and create a calendar, you can have them all in your freezer. If you have a standup freezer and you can have them dated and you can just pull them out and you'll know exactly what those are. Or, like I said before, if you forget, you've got something right there, it's already set. You just pull it out and you can get it all ready. Now you probably have to thaw it out, so you probably have a little foresight to thaw it out and put it in the fridge, but you can have those thawed out and ready to go for when you um, when you want them, or if you're like me and you just forget right. So this is going to save you a ton of time. This is going to save you a ton of money If you, uh, if you, put into place some of these, um, some of these options and and all of them whether it's the meal kit services, whether it's the grocery store apps or the meal kits in the stores they all have some promotions so you can try these and it's pretty economical even just to try and start out doing some of this stuff and seeing what works for you and what doesn't.
Speaker 1:So, nine years down the road, for me, I kind of know what I want. I kind of know what I do. I've got Sundays and Wednesdays on my schedule for grocery shopping at the very minimum. So I know I'm doing that. I know I'm prepping on Sunday with my recipes and my list and I'm setting that in place. And then I know, you know, I'm going on Wednesday for the meals for the rest of the week. So I've kind of got this set up and I like my schedule is flexible, I make my own schedule so I can do, I spend the time and my daughters know that we're going to be. You know, mealtime is going to be meal prep at a certain time of the afternoon or evening and then we'll be cooking. We're going to be sitting down together. Not everybody can do that, and so I recognize that, and that's why being prepared like this will help you immensely.
Speaker 1:And if this is also overwhelming, try starting with just breakfast. Start with breakfast, something small, and prep for breakfasts for that week. And maybe do something like breakfast sandwiches. Prep on Sunday some breakfast sandwiches with an English muffin, eggs and a uh and a beef you know, just a beef breakfast patty. Make those up, put them in Ziplocs, put them in the freezer, make a bunch of them, have them ready to go, pop them in the microwave in the morning. It's going to make your life much easier. It's going to be much healthier than just feeding them that sugary cereal with milk. That's just not going to sustain them through the morning and even get them to the afternoon. And maybe then do the same thing after that. Work on preparing those lunches as well and getting those ready and where you can just pull out during the week and put them in the kids' lunch boxes to go for the day. And then, next thing, work your way up to having the dinner meals as well, and again, engage the kiddos in all this so that they can see and they can also take some, you know, take some ownership of doing this as well.
Speaker 1:Our ultimate goal is to teach our kids how to go off and live their lives as adults and healthy, functioning adults, and eventually they're going to have to learn this stuff, and so the sooner we engage them in this and the sooner that we help them to learn some of these life skills, the better off they're going to be. I know that I wasn't prepared when I went off and some of this stuff was learning, you know, searching around in the dark. So you're actually doing them a service by engaging them and helping them in it. And sometimes they're going to complain, they're going to whine right, they'd rather be playing video games than prepping food. But after a while some of them get really engaged in it. You can have a lot of fun. It's all about the mentality that you take in it, reframing it, making it fun, enjoying the time together. So those are some tips.
Speaker 1:I hope this episode of practical advice on meal planning and meal prep was helpful to you, especially if you're new to this and just going through the divorce you're newly divorced it will be absolutely gratifying going through this and learning. I'm Italian, all of our lives revolve around food and it's a lot of fun to do that as a family, so hope you enjoyed. If you did and you found some value. Please subscribe like our channel. Share this with somebody else. We keep getting some more and more men to the Divorce Dads community or the Divorce Dadvocate community. Our meetings are full every single week. Workshops are building up, classes are coming up, so please share this, pay it forward and let somebody else know about what we're doing here. We're building, going through this together. Let's just help each other. You can get through this. Hopefully this practical advice today will help you do so. Thanks so much. You have a phenomenal week, thank you.
