How to Start Meal Planning

What is Meal Planning?

Meal planning is not calling your partner when you get out of work to ask what they want for dinner. It’s also not deciding that you’re going to have pasta for dinner and buying ingredients while the kids are at school.

Instead, meal planning is setting a dinner (or another mealtime) menu for the week and sticking to it. That means that once a week, you and your family sit down and plan what you’re going to make for dinner for the whole week. You figure out what recipes you’ll use and what ingredients need to be purchased.

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By planning a week’s worth of meals at a time, you can save yourself time and money and cut down on food waste:

• Save time. Instead of the daily back-and-forth of trying to figure out a meal that will please the whole family, followed by trips to the grocery store to grab any missing ingredients, you’ll know what you’re having that night. Some families choose to fully prep a week’s worth of meals ahead of time so they only have to pop a pan in the oven to have dinner ready.
• Save money. Have you ever decided that you wanted to cook a recipe only to learn that you needed to purchase half of the ingredients? Or does your spice cabinet have multiple half-full containers of ground cinnamon because you forgot you had some before you went to the store? Meal planning can help curb some of this needless spending because you’re shopping for the ingredients you need, rather than impulse shopping.
• Minimize waste. Think of the leftovers that your family throws away every week, or the amount of food that is simply purchased by never eaten. By sticking to a meal planning schedule, you can keep this waste to a minimum because you won’t be cooking more than you need.

It’s important to note that meal planning is simply the concept of preplanning your meals and shopping accordingly. There are no rules, and the plan can be adjusted at any time. You can plan for a few days a week, or for a whole month. Your family’s plan might only have homemade ingredients, while another household might rely on canned vegetables, frozen entrees, and other pre-made items. Other families might build take-out into their meal plan for a week.

What’s important to note is that the system is flexible and aims to help families have more time and money, instead of endlessly haggling about what to make for dinner every night.

How to Start Meal Planning

The hardest part about meal planning is getting started. There are three basic steps to successfully implement meal planning:

1. Select your recipes. When you’re selecting your recipes, think about what meal you’re preparing. Some families may stick to a strict schedule where they have pasta on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, and meals that correspond with certain days of the week. There’s no right or wrong way to go about this. In fact, if you’re just getting started with meal planning, it might be smart to start with preplanning a few days a week, instead of the whole week. More experienced meal planners might schedule meals for an entire month
2. Shop for ingredients. Your next step is to make a grocery list and shop for ingredients. Consider all the recipes your family has chosen for the week and what will be needed to complete each dish. Be sure to take stock of the ingredients you have at home so that you’re not unnecessarily spending money on things you already have! Consolidate all the ingredients on your grocery list, rather than breaking them out by individual dishes. Organize similar ingredients together on your shopping list, so that you can check off all the produce, meats, and grains at once.
3. Prepare them. Once you’ve acquired all your ingredients, it’s time to start thinking about how you’d like to prepare everything. Some ideas that you and your family might consider include: chopping, mixing, and portioning all ingredients to save time when cooking, cooking all planned meals at once so they only need to be reheated, and preparing multiples of the same meal and freezing the extras for later. Frozen casseroles are very popular with meal planning families because they freeze and reheat easily.

The more you involve your family in the meal planning process, the more effective it will be. Allow your kids to pick recipes they like and let them help you prepare the ingredients for them. Not only will this save you time and money, but it will allow you and your family to work together and make memories.

Remember that implementing meal planning may have some growing pains, especially if it’s a completely new concept in your household. Allow yourself some grace and start small, planning one or two meals a week to start, and adjust from there.