I know that there are tons of resources out there for meal planning. For planning a month’s worth of meals to fix in one day. To have 7 meals on hand for cooking at anytime.
While these are great ideas, for many young moms, or just women who didn’t get the training when they were younger, the thought of meal planning is scary and overwhelming.
In reality, even if you CAN cook decently, there are an overwhelming number of choices of WHAT you can cook, and then you actually have to have the ingredients on hand to do so, or else you are running out the door at 5:00 to see what you can grab at the corner market.
Your lack of planning is STILL planning, it is just waiting til the last minute while walking through the grocery store! Let me help you plan a little more in advance to save you some unneeded stress.
I want to break this down very simply for those who are just beginning with meal planning. If this post seems a bit too elementary for you, click over to The Dreaded Question “MOM, what’s for dinner?”.
Meal Planning for Beginners
To keep it simple, I am going to show you how to plan for just 4 meals. That shouldn’t be too overwhelming for you newbies. In a nutshell, meal planning is deciding what you are going to cook for the upcoming days, making a corresponding list, and then shopping for the needed items.
1. The first thing you will need to do is set aside a time for meal planning. Many women do this on Saturday or Sunday for the following week. Pop a movie in for the kids or get hubby to take his turn at childcare duty. Say you don’t have time to plan? This planning session will save you LOTS of time and money in the weeks to come!
2. Gather the things below for your meal planning session:
- A piece of paper or a printed meal plan template
- Any recipes or cookbooks you want to try
- Your store’s weekly ad (most are online now)
- Your laptop
- A beverage of your choice
4. Scan your grocery store ads to see what is on a good sale this week. Usually the meats that are on the front page are a good deal (a loss leader). Consider making your meals from items that are on sale to help get more bang for your buck.
5. Decide what meats you will be basing your meals upon. Let’s say you have a 3 lb bag of boneless chicken breasts in the freezer already, and that ground beef is on sale this week. And you can plan to use the cabbage in your fridge as well. You could do 2 chicken dishes and 2 beef dishes.
- your own cookbooks
- numerous blogs – I like Menu Plan Monday (100s of bloggers link up their menu plans for the week)
- Websites such as All Recipes, Cooks.com, or My Fridge Food allow you to search by ingredients you have
- If you are on Pinterest, you can find GREAT meal ideas there!
- How much time will you have for prep?
- Which nights this week will we be home for dinner?
- Do I want to cook enough so that I have leftovers for lunch or another meal?
- Choose a variety of dishes. Don’t have all dishes Italian, or Mexican, etc. Mix it up some.
- Don’t forget about your crockpot!
9. Go grocery shopping! Before you go, add the other items that you know you need on your list. Head to the store and conquer that list!
*Online Meal Planning
For those of you looking to really jump in to meal planning, can I suggest you look at Plan to Eat? You can import recipes from hundreds of websites with the click of a button. Then you just drag-and-drop the desired recipe to the day you want it on. The ingredients are automagically added to your online shopping list! You can also go and alter the shopping list based upon what you have in your pantry. It is REALLY an awesome tool! And you can access on your mobile phone so you don’t have to worry about leaving your list at home (not that I’ve ever done that, lol!)
*affiliate links
Great tips! Thanks:) I especially like the grabbing of a beverage while planning. Coming to you from Women Living Well.
My problem is not so much the inability to plan as the inability to follow through with that plan. So much easier to whip out the lunchmeat than to cook an actual meal. Good intentions and all…
I am not a young mother, more an older grandmother with a toothless husband that want go to the dentist for dentures. Problem is fgixing food for him that he can eat and is tasty and looks good to eat. If you have any suggestions please give them to me. I also cook for my daughter and my granddaughter so this is sometimes hard to plan a meal much less a week full of meals. Any help will be apprecatiated. Thank you in advance.
I love this!
[...] he points out that picking out random recipes from google is not the most effective way start. This post is a more detailed how-to for beginners that I also [...]
[...] Meal Planning101 [...]