Are you struggling to come up with healthy and interesting meals for your family each week? Well, you’re not alone! In this post you can check out some helpful tips for easy meal planning and prep for your week. I will also provide you with a free weekly meal idea printout and a free blank meal planning printable to help make your life as a busy homemaker easier!
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Where do I begin when it comes to meal planning?
Meal planning and prepping is one of those tasks that can seem very daunting at first glance. However, I am here to share my practical tips and tricks that I do every week to make this task more manageable.
Firstly, I give myself the appropriate time to organize the week ahead and do my weekly meal prep. This doesn’t need to take up much time but you do need some undistracted time to think about your upcoming week. I typically designate 20 minutes every Sunday evening to looking at the week ahead. I take out the calendar and see what activities we have going on and then I think about what meals will work around those activities.
The meal that I personally struggle with the most is coming up with family dinner meal ideas. So I tend to focus on dinner in my planning more than the other meals. However, I do write down ideas for the other meals when I have time or if I know we have guest coming to visit. This makes the week so much easier to manage.
What meals should I choose and why?
Have a look at your calendar and decide what meals are practical for each day of the week. For example, if we have soccer on Tuesdays from 5-6pm, I will plan to make a slow cooker meal that evening so the food will be ready for us to eat as soon as we get home. No one wants to come home with a starving soccer player and then have to start making dinner!
Another example would be if I look at the calendar and I see that we are having guests over on the weekend. I don’t want to be cooking the whole time they are visiting so I might plan to make some double batches of food in the week and freeze them. This way I just need to pop them in the oven when my guest are around. I would choose meals like lasagna or beef stew so I can freeze them easily and they can feed a large group of people.
On days and evenings that we don’t have a lot of things going on I will plan to make meals that are a little more involved or need my attention more. For example, making steak or another meat that is very time sensitive and needs a lot of attention to make it taste good.
Once I have an idea of what the week looks like, I will then refer to my weekly meal ideas printout. You can find this for FREE below!
Typically I will cross reference this list with the week ahead and with what food we currently have in the house. If I see that I have some homemade yogurt that is about to go bad, I will make sure I list yogurt parfaits for breakfast on Monday. You can find a blank FREE meal planning printable below. Write down all your meal ideas for the week on the blank meal planning page.
I have a meal plan, now what?
After you write down your meal ideas for the week, you can start making a grocery list of all the items you will need to pick up or order on Monday in order to stick to your meal plan for the week.
I am pretty lazy when it comes to doing groceries so I often continue to sit after I write down my meal ideas and then open up my favorite online grocery ordering app and make an order to arrive the next day.
I find that I save time and money by doing my groceries this way for two reasons.
1. I don’t waste time and gas driving to the store, being in the store, and driving back from the store.
2. I get exactly what I need because I am not forgetting things and I am not buying extra items that look good in the store.
How to be prepared to make meals in the week
There are a couple things you can do to make your meals more streamline. Before you stop reading, I promise I am not one of those people that pre-chops all her vegetables and pre-grates all her cheese on Monday in preparation for the meals ahead. I wish I could be that organized. But, alas, I am only a mere mortal homemaker.
However, I do make sure I know where everything is and when I need to prep my ingredients for each day. Sometimes this is right before I make the meal and sometimes this is in the morning before heading off to school drop off.
One majorly helpful tip I can give you is to take all your meat for the week out of the freezer on Monday morning and put it in the fridge. That way it will be thawed and ready to use whenever you are wanting to start making your meals.
I usually have a look at the meal planning sheet in the morning to see what I am going to be making. For example, if I am making a chicken noodle soup, I will make sure I throw the chicken bones into the instant pot first thing in the day so that the broth is ready by the time I want to put the actual soup together later that day.
There will be some days that you need to do a few extra steps in the morning and some days where you can do it all in 20 minutes later that evening. Again, it all depends on what you have planned for your week. Making a habit of looking at your daily meal plan first thing in the morning will help you to be prepared to actually make the food you planned. It will also eliminate any stress you might have about getting it all done later when you are tired and not in the mood.
Final meal idea and planning thoughts
The first thing I want to say here is that it is okay to not follow through with your meal plan and ideas perfectly. I usually skip one meal or change something up during the week based on what I feel like eating and making. That is okay! You are allowed to use these tools to help you in your week. They are not to dictate what you do.
Secondly, I would also like to say that it is also okay to eat out if you need to. Sometimes I feel like “home cooked meal blogs” can make regular moms feel really inadequate because they never show their families eating out. I will be the first to say that some nights you just need to order a pizza to get everyone fed and in bed on time. That is okay too!
Lastly, I am not big into the kind of meal prep that is really time consuming. Nor I am about preparing for the apocalypse with a million freezer meals. However, I do suggest making at least one freezer meal a month. You can use this as an emergency meal. A healthy meal for your family if you are sick or if company comes over. It really takes away a lot of stress when your schedule doesn’t work out the way you planned.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post. I hope you find the FREE pintables above really helpful in your week. If you have any good family meal ideas or any meal prep tip and tricks please be sure to comment below. Also, I would love it if you shared this post with your friends who could use a free meal ideas sheet. Happy meal prep!
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