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I LOVE meal plans — but I hate writing them up. I usually make them for 4-12 week periods, but this being the year of structure, I made one that would last 365 days.

It seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it?

The thing is, making a year-long plan didn’t take me all that much longer than making one for the month or the season.

I’m sharing the steps that I went through so that you can make one too, if you feel so inclined. It’s not hard. Boring, yes, but not hard. If you decide to make one too, just make sure you have something good to watch on Netflix (and tell me what that is, because I need a new show to love!).

Ready? Let’s get started.

1 Create Categories

Go ahead and open your favourite spreadsheet program. On the first worksheet, we’re going to brainstorm as many dinner meals as we can. Let’s break it down a bit so it’s more manageable.

First, come up with seven categories of meals. The seven categories can be anything — for example, you could go with cooking method, like this:

Sunday: simmer (think soups and stews)
Monday: bake (maybe roasts? Definitely pizza)
Tuesday: tacos (it is Tuesday, after all)
Wednesday: bbq (okay, I don’t have a BBQ, so you have to figure this one out on your own)
Thursday: stir-fry (except… what do you stir-fry besides a stir-fry?)
Friday: slow cooker (pulled pork sandwiches. So good)
Saturday: microwave (I’m not judging)

Another idea? You could embrace stereotypes (now I’m judging) and cook your way around the world:

Sunday: Italian (pasta and pizza)
Monday: Chinese (have you tried this baked sweet and sour chicken recipe?)
Tuesday: still Tacos (still Tuesday)
Wednesday: American (ummm… burgers and fries, I guess)
Thursday: Polish (perogies!!)
Friday: Thai (all Thai food is amazing)
Saturday: … I’ve got nothing. Australian food — is that a thing? Kangaroo meat and vegemite, I guess.

Personally, I find it easiest to organize using a combination of meats and meal styles

Sunday: Soup
Monday: Leftovers
Tuesday: Beef
Wednesday: Chicken
Thursday: Pork
Friday: Slow Cooker
Saturday: Misc.

Yes, Misc.

Saturdays started off as Fish, but that’s never going to happen in this family. Then I made it Vegetarian, and then I finally settled on Misc. It’s code for Bacon.

2 Come Up with Dinner Ideas

Once you’ve chosen your seven categories, type them as the headings for seven columns in your spreadsheet and get ready for some more brainstorming fun (the fun will probably come from the hilarious show you’ve chosen on Netflix).

Under each category, write down as many supper ideas as you can. When I made my list, I aimed for 12 meals in each category, which would have me repeat each one 4-5 times a year.

For example, Sunday: Soup

• broccoli and cheddar soup
• cream of mushroom soup
• tomato-zucchini soup
• tomato soup
• potato-bacon soup
• potato-leek soup
• potato-parsnip soup
• curried carrot and ginger soup
• cream of celery soup
• corn chowder
• cream of cauliflower soup
• chicken and ginger soup
• thai chicken soup

That’s 12 types of soup. With one soup scheduled each week, I’ll be making each of the 4-5 times this year. Although to be honest, these are suggestions more than anything, in case I get stuck. I suspect that most weeks will be “this is what I found in the vegetable crisper” soup, simmered in a broth and topped with a few herbs from the garden. It’s always good.

Some of the categories can be easier than the others. For example, Pork only inspired a few ideas for me:

• spare ribs
• pork chops
• pork fajitas
• pulled pork (which I actually bumped to slow cooker Fridays)
• ham

That’s okay though. The lists under each category don’t need to all be the same length because you will loop through each one individually.

One suggestion: it’s much better to have a short list of meals that you can make confidently than a long list filled with random recipes that you found on a gourmet blog.

That’s not to say that you can’t experiment in the kitchen — you can certainly scrap a scheduled meal anytime you feel inspired to try something different. However, the whole idea behind this meal plan is to reduce your stress. And you know what? The day that you schedule a fancy new meal like Vegan Celery Root and Mushroom Lasagna will inevitably fall on the day that you come home to find your toddler painted a mural with Worcestershire sauce on your living room carpet. And your couch. And did you leave your new coat on the floor? Yeah, on your coat too.

Don’t sabotage your meal plan with fussy recipes. If you stick with dinners that are basic or at least familiar, you’ll be able to do them even on days when you feel less energetic. Like last week: I was so tired, and the last thing I wanted to do was stand up make supper. Despite my lack of energy, I still made meatballs from scratch without any hesitation — because that’s what was on my meal plan. It was easier to just do it instead of coming up with something else. (Something else for us is always scrambled eggs. I’m so sick of scrambled eggs.)

Need some inspiration? These are some cookbooks that I enjoy:

Once you’ve got your supper ideas typed out, move on to breakfast and lunch. These lists are both much easier: I recommend that you come up with one breakfast and one lunch idea for each day of the week and that’s it.

I cannot tell you how much less my kids complain when they have a consistent breakfast and lunch schedule. My oldest is far less likely to whine about “homemade waffles with fresh whipped cream again” when she can see that pizza is coming up the next day. Homemade whipped cream, people. Kids.

Our breakfast | lunch schedule is as follows:

Finished your lists? Before you sign off on your meal plan, take a step back and see if it makes sense. Is there a day that you’re rushed with afternoon swimming lessons and dance class? Why not move your slow cooker list to that day so you don’t have to fuss with a meal on those nights.

I originally had Grilled Cheese on Sundays and French Toast on Thursdays — but given that I bake my own bread on Saturdays, it made sense to move French Toast earlier in the week, when we have bread. Apparently, bread is important for French Toast.

4 Create the Master List

Once you’re satisfied with the general flow of your week, it’s time to create your master list. On a fresh worksheet, enter four headings at the top: Date, Breakfast, Lunch and Supper. I have a fifth column for Notes, where I paste in web links if I remember to. Which is almost never.

In the first column, under Date, you’re going to enter every date from now until the end of the year. Don’t worry, it just takes a second. Type out January 1, 2017 (or whatever day you want to start on) and then grab the fill handle on the spreadsheet cell and drag it down down down until you’re at December 31. (I like to see how close I can stop to December 31. Often I’m off by a few years.)

Next, you’re going to copy and paste all your fabulous meal ideas into the list. I’m not going to lie — this is pretty tedious, so load the next Netflix episode up. Or hey – you could get your kid to do the cut and pasting for you, and count it as a homeschool lesson in computers. There’s a good chance that your kid knows way more about computers than you do and will automate the process with macros or something, finishing in just minutes. But she also might go ahead and replace all your meal ideas with “pizza” as she goes. Gah! All that hard brainstorming work gone! Okay, let’s agree that we won’t let the kids do it. We can get through this ourselves.

First, copy and paste your list of seven breakfast ideas into the first seven days of your master list. Then copy it again to the next week, and then the next week. Do it again and again until you finish the year. Do the same with lunch.

Now for supper. Copy the first entry in your Sunday category (for me, that’s soup) and paste it into the first empty Sunday cell on your master list. Then go back and copy the second entry in your Sunday category and paste it into the next empty Sunday cell on your master list. You get what I’m saying, right? You’re going to copy the first category meal ideas to each Sunday on your mast lister. It’s a lot of back and forth, but you’ll get into a rhythm.

When you get to the bottom of your category’s list, start again at the top and keep copying and pasting until you reach the end of the year. Move to the next category. One by one, populate your list with the meals that you came up with.

A few tips:

1. You might want to change the order of meals a bit while you go, and of course, that’s allowed. For example, I made a point to paste the chilis and stews in the colder months more often and skip them entirely in the summer months.
2. You might also want to eat one particular meal (tacos, obviously) fairly regularly. When I made my master list, I pasted tacos every second Tuesday for the entire year, then I went back and filled in the remaining empty spaces with meals from the rest of the category.
3. It works the other way too — there might be a meal that you want to eat less often. For me, that’s Spare Ribs. I don’t have a lot in my Pork category, but I can’t afford to eat spare ribs every single month. If you saw how many I eat, you’d understand why. To make sure that we weren’t eating spare ribs too often, I added four extra instances of Pork Chops to my Pork list.

You might be wondering how you’re going to eat seasonally when your whole year rotates through the same meals. I’ve never found that to be a problem — I just adjust my recipes to include the fruits and vegetables that are currently available. For example, chicken wraps in the winter might have mashed sweet potato with cinnamon, while in the summer I garnish them with mango instead. Mmmm… those are the best. With Epicure’s Chipotle Aioli? AMAZING. I’m literally drooling as I type. Which is kind of gross, to be honest. I need to clean my laptop keyboard more often.

5 Print Off Your Fabulous Meal Plan

I suppose that you could go ahead and print the whole list out and stick it on your fridge, but that would be a bit much, no? I copied and pasted a week’s worth of meals into a pretty (well, not-ugly) Pages template and printed that off instead. I also included space to assign meal-time chores to my kids so that I know who I’m supposed to be nagging to set the table or peel the veggies.

You might be happier to go paperless and read your meal plan off a screen, or maybe you like to write your menu plan on a laminated sheet that you can reuse week after week (which automatically makes you 47 times more organized than me). Do whatever works for you!

And remember that you aren’t married to the schedule. It’s only a tool that will make life easier — there is no reason that you can’t ignore what’s written on any given day and have tacos instead.

Chances are good that I’m doing the same.