Most of us are tired at the end of the day and may not want or be able to spend a lot of time in the kitchen but weeknight cooking doesn’t have to be a hard and dreaded task. Planning ahead will allow for you and your family to enjoy delicious meals. Meal planning helps with time, saving money and nutritious meals.
Meal planning can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be and it’s important to find what works for you and your family. Here are some tips that work for us as a busy family of five. Remember there is no right or wrong way to do it and keep consistent and experimenting until you find what works for you!
We like to plan our meals on a weekly basis and try to get ours done either Friday for the following week or Sunday morning so we can do our grocery shopping on Monday for the week. Here you’ll find a helpful list where you can layout your meal for the day and add your groceries.
- Look at your schedule and determine which nights you’ll have time to make meals and which nights will be leftovers, or eating out, etc.
- Pick your meals. We love looking through cookbooks and searching for new recipes online.
- Choose which meals are going to be for each day.
- Take inventory of what you have available at home and create a grocery list of all the ingredients you will need to purchase.
- Shop and/or order your groceries.
Here are a few of our favorite cookbooks where we’ve found easy and delicious meals. We are very into slow cooker meals where we can “set it and forget it”.
- From Freezer to Cooker (here)
- Sheet Pan Suppers Cookbook (here)
- Half Baked Harvest Cookbook (here)
- The Stay-at-Home Chef Slow Cooker Cookbook (here)
(Here) is the link for the Slow Cooker we have and we've been using these liners for the slow cooker that we really like. The liners make for a super easy clean up! (Here is the link for the liners)
Do you meal plan? We’d love to know some of your favorite recipes. Share with us!
*Please note, this post contains affiliate links.* I will earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links.