Making a meal plan can be simple if we choose foods that our families love. Although the choices get narrower as the week goes along, I rarely have trouble making the items on the list sometime during the week, and our food gets used and cycled while it’s fresh. That way, I feel freer in my choice and not locked into a meal I don’t feel like for the next day. I add ingredients for the meals on the list that I don’t have to my grocery list.ĭuring the week, I look at the list in the evening and choose what to make for dinner the next day (in time to thaw anything frozen). I try to list things we always like, but every couple of weeks, I add a new recipe just to try it. I plan seven dinners for the next week around in house and sale items and post the list on my refrigerator. I plan for dinners, and we eat standard items for breakfast and lunch, or leftovers for lunch. The night before I grocery shop, I “shop” my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer for ingredients that should be used up along with the grocery ad from our paper. Shop Your Pantry, Freezer, and Refrigerator First! Eventually your goal would be to have a month of recipes you know everyone likes and can use that to help pick things and make the planning side easier. You can either use old favorite recipes or search out new options on the internet.Ī tip for making meal planning easier over time is that once you have determined a recipe to be a favorite, put it on a special sheet somewhere that you can access when planning meals so you can use it to choose recipes in the future.
#All things meal planning how to
(See How to Read Your Grocery Ad Like an Insider.) In this case, if your family is okay with it, you may want to plan for two vegetarian meals because vegetarian meals are quite often cheaper than meat based meals and two meals with the cheapest meat you can get that week. If budget is your main concern, a second type of planning is to use your flyers to see what meats are on sale and then plan meals around each of those. Once the recipes are chosen, decide which day to make each based on your family’s schedule versus the time commitment needed or simply assign one night to each protein and repeat from week to week in the same order. Keep track of which ones the family likes, so you can use them again. Because variety is key, you should use the internet and your cookbooks or magazines to try new recipes or variations each week.
Step two would be to decide on what kind of dishes to make for each of those categories, which one will be your roast meal, and what you want to make with the leftovers.
If you never eat out, then you may want to plan an additional meal that uses a type of ground meat for example. If you usually eat out once a week, then this will be fine. Make one of those meals a roast or a large quantity meal so that it can be spread out to use leftovers for a sixth meal. You may plan one beef, one pork, one chicken, one fish, and one vegetarian meal for each week or some variation that works for your dietary needs. If your priority is variety, then you might want to start by planning based on your protein. There are several ways to start with meal planning depending on your priorities.
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