Earlier this year I was creating (and sharing) weekly meal plans my family was using to add variety to our dinners, as well as focus on healthier, more nutritious food. I was pretty consistent with meal planning for months and then I hit a wall ... and the wall had a name: Mike. My husband does all the grocery shopping and cooking in our house. He's much better at it and really loves to cook. I don't enjoy cooking and really, really dislike grocery shopping. On the other hand, Mike doesn't like cleaning up after cooking and I'm happy to clean, so we divide the chores based on your likes. He cooks the meals and I clean them up. So it's a win-win for both of us. But we ran into a problem with the meal planning. I was picking all the meals and making grocery lists for Mike, but he wasn't thrilled about the recipes I was picking. He wanted to craft our meal plans because that's part of the fun for him. He loves to pour over cookbooks and web sites to plan the perfect meal. He even looks at the grocery stores' weekly advertisements to see what's on sale and bases his menus on that. I was sucking some of the joy from his process by doing the mea planning for him. A couple of months ago I hand the task back to him and we quickly got back on track. Mike plans for and cooks about five or six nights a week.

If I wanted to keep having healthy meals and trying new things, I had to hand over control of the menu planning to Mike. I like to control things. That's well established. But in this case, it was silly for me to insist I pick the meals we have each night.

Since Mike took over, we've been trying all sorts of yummy stuff. He uses a Google Sheet to plan our meals. On the sheet is also our grocery list, so he can make sure he has everything for the various meals he's planned. I rarely even look at the Sheet. It's his thing and dinner comes out much better when I stop meddling with the process.

Right now we're doing the Whole30 program (I'll blog about this next week, after we have a whole week or 10 days under our belt), so we've been eating almost exclusively out of the Whole30 Cookbook. In September we'll going back to eating pretty much a Paleo diet, since I can't have gluten or dairy. When we're eating a more mainstream diet, I'll start sharing our meal plans again, so you can see what Mike is cooking up (he's a really GREAT cook, so you'll be totally jealous!).

What are you eating these days? What does your family meal planning look like? Any tips for us?