Weekly menu planning

Menu planning is a life saver for me. I literally couldn’t cook dinner or grocery shop without doing a menu plan for the week. When I’m cooking dinner, I like having a list of meals to choose from each day of the week and knowing that I have the ingredients in the house to make those meals. Some people plan out what they are having for dinner each day that week. I like having a little more freedom than that. Sometimes our schedule changes during the week and one night I might need a faster, easier meal to make. You can do what works best for you and your family.

I also learned a couple of tricks to make meal planning even easier. I used to spend hours browsing through my recipe books and Pintrest, trying to get inspired and find recipes to add to my menu list for the week. It worked, but it was very time consuming and I was starting to dread meal planning. I decided to create a list of meals that included our favorites to eat, ones I liked to cook and ones that we didn’t mind including in the meal rotation.

I came up with a list of about 25 meals for dinner. I keep this list in the notes on my phone. Every time I make a certain meal, I put the date we ate it next to the recipe name. I keep the dates for the last few times that we had that meal. So when I’m making my weekly menu plan and looking at my list of meals; I can see that it’s been a month since we had that meal so it’s ok to add it to the menu for this week. It is just so much easier to have a list of dinner meals to choose from and it makes menu planning go so much faster. I will still browse through my recipe books or Pintrest every once in a while for some new inspiration. And if we like the new recipe that I try, it goes on my meal list.

I do my meal plan once a week. You can do the same or do it for every two weeks or once a month. I make a list of meals to cook for dinner that week and add the ingredients I need to buy to my grocery list. This also helps in going to the store less often during the week. I do my major grocery shopping at one of my local stores one night a week. This includes most of the grocery items that we buy and eat during the week. My other local store has specific items I like to buy and good sales on items I purchase regularly so I will shop there on a different day. So unless we unexpectedly run out of something or crave a certain snack, I usually only go to the store twice a week. That definitely helps save money in the grocery budget.

See how menu planning can change your life. It takes a little time and work at first, but then you will find the rest of your week a lot less stressful. No more wracking your brain to try to figure out what to make for dinner last minute. You can customize your plan to what works best for you. You can make lists or do it in a calendar format. You can even create a menu board in your kitchen so everyone can see what’s for dinner.

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