Meal Planning can be the key to a successful family kitchen.
Create a weekly menu with your favorite meals. A weekly meal plan can not only free up time but create less stress, save you money, and help you create healthy meal options for your family. Since making meals is a big part of our everyday home life, it only makes sense to include meal planning as one of our organizational goals. This is one area I have never been good at and often find myself pulling something from the freezer a little too late only to find I also don’t have everything I need. I have started working on my menus and hope to have several weekly menus planned that I can rotate throughout the year.
Get started by getting yourself a plain notebook or a meal planner. and a recipe book. Start with some of your favorite family meals. Add in a new healthy meal to try each week. Swap recipes with friends for new things to try. As you create your weekly menu you can jot the ingredients down that you’ll need to purchase for each meal on your weekly shopping trip.
Be sure to include using your slow cooker in your meal plans for at least a couple of days each week. If something unexpected comes up that week you can rotate days and you won’t have to worry about getting dinner done. A home meal plan helps ease the stress of ‘what’s for dinner?’ by having meals pre-planned and ingredients ready ahead of time. One key to having a successful home meal plan is planning meals around recipes with similar ingredients, so it reduces the number of groceries needed per week. Meal planning also saves time, as you don’t have to constantly search for what to make for dinner every day - it’s already written down! I suggest creating a home meal plan at the start of the week so you know what’s for dinner for the rest of the week. As well as planning out dinners, breakfast, lunch, and snacks should also be included in the home meal plan.
Check out this simple meal planner with a tear-off grocery list and with 54 sheets enough to create a menu for each week of the year.
