Mastering the art of food preparation will importance of meal planning save you a lot of time and money! how to meal plan Oh, and best of all, meal planning will save you stress.
Imagine coming home from work to hungry kids, but you know exactly what to feed them for dinner. And have those things at home! It’s not a fantasy, promise.
Love sharing how you can develop a quick system to organize steps of meal planning your favorite foods, meals, and schedule. It’s not about food, or complicated menus, or what your greedy neighbor is eating.
Plan is designed to work for you and your family no matter what you choose to eat. Also share with you everything you need to know to create a simple meal planning worksheet and walk you through simple steps you can take every week to become a meal planning ninja. Also use these recipe charts in my binders, but you can create similar ones using plain notebooks.
Meal planning may help you to avoid the proverbial question of “what’s for dinner” and keep you on track, no matter what your nutrition goal is. Meal planning is an excellent way to counteract time scarcity and encourage preparing your own meals at home.
What is Meal Planning?
Meal planning is the act of deciding what you will eat for the next few days. This could be every meal and snack, or some meals, such as only work lunches, or only evening meals.
Meal planning has multiple benefits. It can:
- Save Time: Planning ahead can give you a better chance of saving time deciding what to eat and how to make it or needing to run out for a few groceries. This can save you a lot of time over the course of the week.
- Save Money: You can also save a lot of money by meal planning since it can lead to reduced food waste, less chance of relying on takeout, and only buying what you need at the grocery store. Fewer trips to the store could save you time and money on travel as well.
- Improve Health: Research shows that meal planning increases the variety of foods you eat, which could lead to a wider range of nutrients in your diet. It’s also shown to help with healthy weight balance and more nutritious meals.
Why is meal planning important?
When you spend just 30 minutes a week to plan meals you will:
-
Have healthy food in the house.
-
Breeze through the grocery store with an organized list
-
Know what’s for dinner every single night.
-
Have healthy snack foods on hand for yourself and your kids.
-
Stop the 6pm emergency drive thru habit.
-
Feel calm when it’s time to pack lunches for the kids.
-
You can easily follow a diet program.
3 Steps for Optimal Meal Planning
Diet planning doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Any time you invest in meal planning will pay off within weeks when you consider the time saved in shopping, figuring out what to eat, and other things that eat up your time little by little.
It is wise to consider your individual dietary needs and goals, as well as any budget and time constraints you may have when planning a meal. By considering these factors, you will be able to take advantage of the benefits of food processing. Here are three simple steps to follow for optimal meal planning.
1) Select Recipes or Basic Meal Constructs
The first step is to find a recipe or choose the main ingredients and types of food that you can easily prepare. Which method to take depends on your time and your culinary experience. You may also want to consider the ingredients you already have on hand, so you can use them up and not waste anything.
AYou can choose quick and easy meals for working days and complex and complicated recipes for the weekend, for example. You can also plan to prepare a large meal on the weekend that will provide leftovers for a few days of the week, saving more time and money.
2) Make a Shopping List & Shop for Ingredients
3) Prepare Meals
Depending on the types of meals you have planned and your time constraints, you could batch cook some meals or meal components or decide to make dishes daily. If you can set aside a few hours for batch cooking, you’ll save time over the week.
If making several entire meals at once is too daunting, you can prep meal components ahead of time instead. For example, cook proteins, grains, and veggies in batches, perhaps with different herbs and spices. You can also cut up and store some of the components of meals for faster prep when the time comes to create your dish and eat it.
Now that you have your plan, shopping list, and designated time, it’s time to start prepping your meals. Follow these steps to ensure a smooth and efficient meal prep process:
- Wash and prep produce: Rinse all fruits and vegetables, then chop, slice, importance of meal planning or dice as needed for your recipes.
- Cook proteins: Grill, bake, or sauté your protein sources according to your meal plan.
- Prepare grains and legumes: Cook rice, quinoa, pasta, or beans according to package instructions.
- Assemble meals: Portion out your prepared ingredients into meal containers or storage bags. This can be done by creating individual servings or family-sized portions, depending on your preference.
- Store meals: Label your containers with the meal name and date, then store them in the refrigerator or freezer, depending on when you plan to eat them.
4) Determine your Recipes
The next step involves planning the actual recipes you would like to make for the week. It’s a good idea to come up with a set number of recipes for the week without actually setting any specific days on which to eat them. This will give you more freedom to choose the meal that sounds satisfying to you each day. Some further considerations for selecting weekly recipes include:
- Plan meals that integrate well with your work, home, and social schedule.
- Plan for days that you may prefer take-out or dining-out options.
- Ask your household for their input and include meals that everyone will enjoy.
- Check your pantry and fridge to see what ingredients you already have to work with.
- Choose some recipes that are familiar and easy to cook.
- Look up new recipes and throw one or two into your plan each week to keep it interesting.
- Plan to eat leftovers for some meals.
Tips & tricks for meal planning
Planning and preparing entire meals is great, but you can take your meal planning to the next level by identifying importance of meal planning other items that you can use repeatedly in your cooking.
1. Sauces, condiments, dips, and dressings
Get creative with adaptable ingredients. For example, making your own condiments can be a good way to save money and can be used to add flavor to many different meals.
2. Roasted vegetables for days
A large batch of roasted vegetables can go a long way with little prep. Roasted veggies can be used as a snack, ingredients to flesh out casseroles, or even served as standalone sides.
3. Plan your snacking
Your family will most certainly want to snack throughout the week. To fill that gap in your planning, especially importance of meal planning if you’re concerned with healthy eating, think of the textures and flavors of your go-to snacks and find healthier substitutes. Like swapping out potato chips for kale chips.
4. Timing your grocery trip
You should make your plan for the week ahead a few days before you need to buy groceries. This gives you time to search for recipes, check on what you have left from last week, and what you’re running low on.
5. Use fresh ingredients first
There’s little worse than seeing fresh produce go bad before you have a chance to use it, so plan to use your freshest ingredients at the beginning of the week. Toward the end of the week, you should be planning meals that allow you to use the longer-lasting items, as well as any leftover ingredients.
6. Buy what’s in season
Fun fact: buying ingredients that are in season is usually cheaper. For instance, when it’s tomato season, buy fresh how to meal plan tomatoes instead of canned ones.
7. Keep an eye out for discounts
At certain times of the year, you’ll find certain items discounted. Try to anticipate these seasonal discounts, importance of meal planning and look out for coupons, sales, and discount sections.
8. Set goals for the family
Think about your goals and parameters for your meal plan before you start. For some people, it’s sticking to a budget. Others are based on dietary restrictions or special diets. Everything will be easier if you know what your goals are.
9. Have a good sense of your budget
It’s always helpful to get a sense of your budget when strategizing for importance of meal planning meal prep. Whether you’re a solo how to meal plan shopper or planning for the whole family, you can determine a solid estimate for your food budget using our grocery budget calculator.
10. Focus on your weak links
Your meal planning should address the areas where you’re struggling the most. For example, if your mornings are too rushed to prepare breakfast, plan around that.
11. Batch your meals
Build your meal plan around dishes that can be prepared in large batches and eaten across a few meals’ importance of meal planning throughout the week. When you’re cooking, separate your batch into portions for freezing. A more ambitious approach is to make multiple batches importance of meal planning of a dish at once to cover several weeks. This is an especially delicious idea for curries and soups.
12. Quick meals
Another cornerstone of your planning should be easy-to-make meals that can be prepared in 20 minutes. This can be how to meal plan as simple as prepping the ingredients for a stirfry in advance and tossing them together into a wok for dinner.
13. Eating out or ordering takeout
Very few people cook every meal for themselves, so there’s no shame in building “cheat meals” into your importance of meal planning meal plan. Eating in a restaurant or ordering a takeout pizza can give you a break, as well as give your family a ritual to look forward to.
14. Take your time and enjoy yourself
If you enjoy cooking, you’ll probably be interested in meals that require more time to prepare, or that involve a larger number of ingredients. Just make sure that more challenging meals don’t leave you with too many ingredients leftover that you can’t use. If you’re an especially ambitious cook, pay attention to how many ingredients these more complicated meals require. As part of your planning, think about how you’re going to incorporate the more specialized ingredients in future dishes.
15. Tweak your classics
As you build up your repertoire of dishes, you don’t have to let things become mundane. If you make chili every week, for example, you can keep things interesting by adding new flavors. If you cook a new or more challenging dish every week, you may have leftover ingredients that you don’t know how to use. Why not throw that herb or spice into a soup, salad, or sauce for something new?
16. Conduct a weekly review
Make a habit of starting your meal planning by reviewing the previous week. What worked, what didn’t, and what can you do better next week? Perhaps you want to introduce more fresh fruit to your diet or want to plan for several days a week when you don’t eat meat. Use a journal to keep track of your own thoughts, as well as feedback from your family, or any notes on allergies.
17. Use what you already have
Before you make your plan each week, check your fridge and pantry to identify any items you need to use. You can then focus your choice of meals for the next week on making sure nothing goes to waste. Have a few recipes up your sleeve that allow you to use excess ingredients or anything that is close to expiring — casseroles, pizzas, salads, and one-pot dishes are all handy.
18. Write it down
Whether you use a pen and paper, a note-taking app on your mobile or computer, or a spreadsheet to record data like recipes, quantities, prices, and more, your meal plan isn’t a plan unless it’s written down somewhere. The best solution is the one that you find easiest to look at and are most likely to use. You can even keep it classic and buy recipe cards to write down what you need.
19. Organize your meals
If you’re preparing meals in batches, you’re going to need a system to keep track of everything. You can use color-coded labels, or better yet, color-coded containers, to organize and label your meals. For example, a certain color might indicate whether a meal is breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or correspond to the days of the week.
20. Raise your appliance game
Invest in appliances that will complement your meal-planning goals. Whether you’re using a slow cooker or instant pot, a toaster oven for secondary roasting or baking, or defrosting and reheating meals using a microwave, devices that can help accelerate food preparation can make a huge difference.
How to Make Meal Planning a Habit
To turn meal planning into a habit, schedule it into your routine. After you’ve accomplished one week of meal planning, you’ll likely need another big grocery shopping trip or delivery. Just repeat the three-step process and continue your routine until it becomes second nature.
After a couple of weeks, you will likely see what is working for you and what isn’t. If you start simple in your first week or two, you can branch out with more involved or creative recipes, or even begin to include more meals and snacks into your planning and prep.
It’s also wise to make sure you have everything you need to make meal planning and prep easy. You’ll want enough food storage containers to store your prepped and cooked foods, as well as any staples you’ll keep in your fridge and cupboards. Other items to consider are meal planning worksheets or lists and labels for your meals or meal planning apps that can make the process easier.
