Welcome parents! If you are here, you already know that creating a meal plan for your family is the best way to save money, eat healthier, waste less food, and save time. But fitting that into your busy schedule is where we come in. With over 15 years of experience, we at Cook Smarts have mastered how to meal plan for families of every size. Keep reading for a step-by-step guide to creating a weekly meal plan and our favorite meal planning template.
- By Jess Dang
- August 17, 2021
Meal Planning for Busy Parents
We at Cook Smarts understand the challenges of feeding kids of all ages because we are busy parents ourselves. No matter how you feel about cooking, adding kids into the mix makes getting dinner on the table more complicated. That’s why we’ve created this easy guide to help you get a plan in place to be more consistent with meal planning.
Just follow the steps below to create an easy weekly meal plan for your family. Whether you’re a beginner looking to create your first meal plan, or an experienced meal planner looking for examples to simplify the process, this article will help you reach your dinner goals.
Step 1: Set a Schedule
Decide now which day of the week you’ll do your meal planning, which day you’ll do your grocery shopping, and which day you’ll do your meal prep (if you plan to prep in advance). By eliminating these recurring decisions, you can save your focus for deciding what to eat and when — and won’t end up negotiating with yourself when it’s time to set your menus. Flexibility is key, so know that you can always move things around as needed.
Step 2: Create a Visual Meal Plan Chart
Don’t let meal planning add to your mental clutter. Create a visual plan for your week, whether it’s a paper calendar on the fridge, a sheet of notebook paper, a system of sticky notes, or a whiteboard pre-labeled with the days of the week. Make it easy enough to shuffle meals around when necessary, but specific enough that you know what’s coming up when — in other words, a schedule, not just a list of meals.
Step 3: Start with What You Know
Begin filling in your plan with the easy stuff: Is there a night each week that you typically get takeout? A day you know you have a lunch meeting or the kids will buy lunch at school? Add it to your plan! Next, is there a day or days you’ll want to have leftovers or frozen meals? Leftovers and frozen meals are great for weekday lunches, of course, but they are also fantastic for days when an event runs into dinnertime (or the time you’d normally spend cooking), or nights that will otherwise be busy for any reason. Add leftovers nights to your meal plan now so you’ll know to choose a meal or meals to double earlier in the week.
Step 4: Fill in Meals
Fill in what’s left with additional meals you want to make or buy for the week. When meal planning for families, it’s always a good idea to ask your family members to suggest ideas, or just start by plugin in a few meals you know everyone loves. For the rest of the meals use cookbooks, recipe sites, Pinterest, or search engines to find the right recipes. Also don’t forget about meals you already know how to make and enjoy — having a couple of “old favorites” each week that don’t require a recipe or much thought can be a lifesaver! Cook Smarts members do some of this planning right in our app, allowing them to default to our weekly meal plan and then substitute in meals from their list of favorites.
Step 5: Make your Grocery List and Shop
All you have left is to create a grocery list and pick up the groceries you need. If you’re using Cook Smarts, this involves a single click for the Cook Smarts meals, and then you can manually add everything else you need to your digital shopping or printable list.
Meal Plan Membership
If you’re looking to take the guesswork out of your family’s meal plan, we would love for you to join our community of home cooks. Try a free 14-day trial of our meal plan. You can use our done-for-you meal plan each week or customize it to better fit our dinner plans for the week. Our weekly menus include family-friendly options and offer vegetarian, gluten-free, and paleo variations.
Other Helpful Hints for Easy Meal Planning
Follow these tips to make sure your meal plan can be carried out smoothly:
1. Get your family involved
Meal planning for families means you’re working with a variety of food preferences. The best way to stay ahead of this is to ask your family to get involved. Keep a running list of meals the entire family loves or ask them for requests. Most Cook Smarts members keep a running list inside our app of meals that are winners with their entire family. We also find that kids love to scroll through our visual library of thousands of meals and choose one or two to add to the meal plan.
2. Schedule meals in order of their ingredients’ shelf life
Fresh seafood should be eaten the day you buy it or the next day. Delicate produce like lettuce and spinach need to be eaten within a few days, so are best used early in the week. And of course, if you already have veggies in your fridge from the previous week (and they’re still in good shape), prioritize them in your meal plan. Check out our Produce Shelf Life infographic for more:
Related
Reduce Food Waste with Our Produce Shelf Life Guide
With our vegetable shelf life guide, you can waste less food which will save money. Try out this one waste… Read more.
3. Choose some efficiencies
Use your time wisely by choosing some “prep once, eat twice” foods. Exactly how you do this is up to you. Some people like to eat leftovers of each meal, so you might cook Monday and Tuesday, then eat Monday’s leftovers on Wednesday and Tuesday’s leftovers on Thursday. Or maybe you double your meals to have easy lunches the next day.
Another option is to cook a portion of a meal, and then turn the leftovers into a new meal entirely, like what we do with these Cook Once, Eat Twice recipes:
Related
Save Hours Each Week With These Cook Once, Eat Twice Recipes
Repurposed recipes make cooking easy and quick. Our free mini recipe book has 5 tasty recipes that can be transformed… Read more.
Printable Family Meal Planner
Ready to get started?! To make meal planning easy, print our family meal planning template. Fill in breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for each day so you always know what’s coming up.
To simplify the process of meal planning and let someone else do much of the work for you, sign up for a free trial of our meal plan service. You’ll get full access to weekly dinner meals plans, thousands of additional recipes from the archives that can be added or swapped, a one-click grocery list, and full optional Instacart integration!
