This has not worked as well as I thought. I try to make dinner on nights when we'll both be home for dinner. Thursdays are always Crock Pot nights because we're both home for dinner at different times, and that way I can just leave it on "Keep Warm" and we both get a hot dinner. But inevitably, no matter how well I plan, we either end up with not enough food to take for lunches, or SO MUCH LEFT OVER that I worry it'll all go bad before we can consume it.
Weekly meal plan. I usually write if they come out of a cookbook or my bookmarks too, so I can keep track.
For example, this was my best-laid weekend dinner plan:
• Lenten Fridays are still in action, so I made Tuna and White Bean Wraps. They made wayyyy more food than I thought they would. We ate them for lunch every day over the weekend, plus dinner for Friday, and we still have leftover tuna.
• I knew I wanted to freeze some food for later weeks when I accidentally make too little food, so on Saturday I made a Crock full of Chicken Chili. After we had dinner, I froze the bulk of the leftovers, but kept a few tupperwares out for lunches.
• Sunday night, I made Chicken Florentine. It was a casserole dish-sized amount of food. I froze a good chunk of it so we can have it for dinner another night, saving a few tupperwares for lunch. But oh no, in order to make it, I bought a rotisserie chicken. So now I also have about 3/4 of a whole chicken left in the fridge.
Matt's parents have a three-day rule on leftovers — if it's more than three days old, you can't guarantee it's still good. On the other hand, my dad always figured if it didn't smell bad or look gross (his standards for the latter are lower than mine), then it was still fine. I'm really paranoid, so I usually follow the three-day rule just to be safe.
Which means we have a heck of a lot of stuff to eat in the next three days.
Have you figured out how to balance too little vs. too much? I need some help! How do you meal plan? And how do you figure out what freezes well and what doesn't?