Week 1 - Constructing a meal plan for the family

Hi and thanks for reading this post. 

I am a father who has recently decided to have a plant-based diet; my wife and I have two wonderful children, a 4 year old and a 2 month old. Today, I stumble on my first major challenge...

First of all, I am unable to convince my wife to become vegan. Her position is that it does not seem possible to have a nutritionally balanced diet on plants only. Whether she is right or wrong, I need to respect her choice, and since she is breastfeeding, it may be sensible to not restrict her diet unnecessarily. Though I don't necessarily disagree with her position, this makes cooking and meal planning extremely difficult.

The same goes for our four-year old. Are we sure that children can thrive on a plant-based diet? Will he even want to eat the meals I prepare? I guess we will find out.

Bottom line: it seems sensible to have some meat and dairy available to my wife and our child, even if this makes things really complicated.

Preparing a meal plan for a vegan father, a non-vegan mother, and a fussy (non-vegan) four-year old.

So where to start...

At this point I guess I should disclose that I am a number cruncher by training, so my immediate thought is to approach this very methodologically. So let's lay out the conditions that need to be met by this meal plan.

1. There are seven days in a week, 3 meals and 2 snacks in a day. My plan needs to cover all seven days for my wife. As he attends nursery three days a week, my son will need breakfast every day, as well as lunch and dinner 4 days a week.
2. My wife and son will need dairy daily and meat or fish a couple of times a week. However, I can't afford the time to cook two separate meals so somehow the non-vegan items will ideally need to be added when serving.
3. I need this plan to be healthy. My ambition is to adhere to Michael Greger's daily dozen (https://nutritionfacts.org/daily-dozen-challenge/) where the aim is to incorporate, every single day:
• 3 servings of beans
• 1 serving of berries
• 3 servings of fruit
• 1 serving of cruciferous vegetables
• 2 servings of greens
• 3 servings of other vegetables
• 3 servings of whole grains
• flaxseed, nuts, and seeds
4. I need to minimise the time I spend in the kitchen. This means that I need to cook enough servings to cover more than one meal so that dinner one day can be lunch the next day.

OK. At this point I hit a bit of a low. Perhaps I am aiming way too high here. But this is the start of my journey and I really want to try and start with a blast!

Now is the time to figure out what to cook... simple right? NOT! I decided it would be best to start the meal plan on a Friday and do the shopping on Thursday, so that I could get as much cooking done over the week-end.

I decide that the easiest way, for this first time, would be to address each day one at a time. Each day I wanted to make sure I incorporated the daily dozen. For my non-vegan family, I assumed that dairy, meat, or fish could replace a serving of beans.

Here's an ACTUAL picture of my tedious over the top effort

After doing this for each day, I now had a plan. Snacks were a good opportunity to incorporate dairy for my family, however I found meat or fish difficult to incorporate other than adding them onto a vegan dish like a garnish...

The final step is to prepare a shopping list... and think about the INSANE amount of fruit and vegetables that I would be buying...

And now.... 

the meal plan:

OK.. so here is the final plan (in a nice spreadsheet...)

 

the (handwritten) shopping list:

 I have a well stocked pantry so some items aren't in the shopping list (e.g. tinned sweetcorn, tuna, chickpeas, black beans, etc...)

 

WELL... here we are! I now have a plan and a shopping list, and although this felt like a massive undertaking already, I know this was just the easy bit!

I hope you enjoyed this post and I look forward to sharing my shopping experience with you next!
I would love to hear your comments and suggestions for future posts!

See you soon!
Brad