Meal planning is a great way to cut out some of the chaos in your week. There is nothing worse than trying to figure out what to make for dinner at 5pm. And when you do finally decide on something, you realize you don’t have a key ingredient!
You can save money with meal planning. In order to save money while meal planning browse the weekend sale flyers before planning your meals. Base the plan on what is on sale instead of picking random recipes from a cookbook. Maybe there is a great deal on chicken this week. Once you discover that, then see what meals you can make with chicken.
Another way you save money with meal planning is by making fewer trips to the store. If you’re constantly running back to the store for that key ingredient you are most likely picking up other unnecessary items along the way. If you meal plan you won’t be tempted to spend extra money during the week.
Meal plan weekly or monthly. There are people that successfully meal plan for the week and the month. If you are a buy-in-bulk shopper, you may be able to pull off making a meal plan monthly. Just imagine, a whole month of meals laid out in front of you! Perhaps you are a weekly shopper and prefer to do a weekly meal plan. Either will work; it just depends on what works best for you!
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how I long to be sensible enough to create and stick to a meal plan!!!
I plan every meal, every week, period. I actually have a monthly calendar that I plan, but I shop weekly because A) I know when what goes on sale and B) the grocery store is, literally, the only “me” time I get every week. If I don’t plan and shop once a week, I spend double what I need to, at least.
Really, I counted once. It was kind of gross how much I spent without a plan.
I love planning our meals. {I do a weekly menu} I even plan our snacks like : wing on LOST night and Hagen Daz on Movies night! The kids love that popcorn is in regular stock for making the basement into a movie theater.
I have been meal planning for 2 years now and LOVE IT. It has saved my sanity. If anyone is interested in sharing weekly plans let me know, I am happy to send over ideas of weeks that have worked for us (I save them all so that in a pinch, I can just pull out a previous meal week plan and I’m off to the races)
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I would so love to be able to plan my meals ahead, but I have 3 issues:
1) a daughter who dances 4 nights and a week, has a busy social schedule on the weeknight she doesn’t, and works various schedules on Thursday nights, Saturday and Sunday (anywhere from 6 am to 12 midnight).
2) a son, who at 11, will still not touch a vegetable or fruit (including tomato sauce unless it’s on pizza or in ketchup!) and who picks at anything that isn’t chicken fingers, macaroni (not the homemade kind EWWW!), hamburgers, quesadillas (cheese only), pancakes or waffles.
3) a husband who is almost as anti-veg as his son (corn, peas, green beans and that’s about it).
I have such a hard time finding recipes that everyone will eat, and I’m so tired of the same old dishes!
If anyone has suggestions, PLEASE HELP!
Okay Tanna, I have another one for you! Books! Namely kids books. We have a lot of them. And I love having them available for my kids all the time but all I’ve managed to do is have big messy baskets full of books in several rooms of the house. Toddlers just like dumping them out, and the ones at the bottom get forgotten. What to do, what to do?
Sara, That is a hard one, as I am not the cook in the family. My oldest is 9 and we just got him to the point where he will try new foods and eat vegetables. Fruit is still out of the question. We give him a tiny portion of veggies and he has to eat them before he gets up. He has learned to get them over with. Hubby is a healthy eater so I feel for you when you deal with two that are anti-veg.
It took us a while to work with our son. The other two love veggies because they were never given the option to not eat them like I did with our first. My daughter asks for broccoli for dinner!
Let me see what meals I can put together after I talk to a few people. This will be an interesting topic.