Life is hard enough as it is for busy moms. Preparing meals for your family shouldn’t add extra stress to your life.
How to Plan Meals for the Entire Week
This is why planning meals for the full week can make your life so much easier. In this article, we will break down how to plan meals into just a few easy steps. Read on to learn more!
How to Plan Meals: The Menu
The first step to prepping your meals for the week is setting a menu important to take the likes and dislikes of your family members into consideration when planning.
There are lots of different options when planning your menu. You could opt to repeat several different meals throughout the week or change it up frequently. You could also choose to prep all your meals or maybe just one meal a day.
Spend some time searching for recipes that you like and then save those to bring back in your weekly planning. However, it will be helpful later to choose recipes that don’t require a small amount of one special ingredient you won’t use again.
Grocery Shopping
Once you’ve decided upon a menu for the week, write down a list of ingredients you will have to purchase.
It might be a good idea to consider your grocery budget when you plan your menu. If you are trying to save money, you will want to think about using as much of what you already have at home as possible.
Once you start to find recipes that your family always loves, you can plan to have those ingredients on hand at all times to make grocery shopping even easier! Keeping a well-stocked pantry will make this process a breeze.
Pay attention to what foods are on sale and in the season to help save even more money!
Meal Prepping & Storage
Once you have acquired all of the ingredients you need to prepare for the week, you can either decide to make your meals throughout the week or prep them in larger batches.
This is dependent on the meals that you are preparing and the time you have throughout the week. If you plan to have a meal repeated several times throughout the week, it might make sense to set aside some time on Sunday and prepare all of the food to save.
It’s also a good idea to make sure you have some storage containers (as well as plenty of fridge space) to keep your food safe.
Once you have your food prepped for the full week, you can also easily experiment with timing meals for weight loss and other health purposes!
Easy, Healthy Meal Planning
As you can imagine, Meal planning takes some planning and organization on the front end, but it can be worth it! Once you figure out how to plan meals your family loves, the process will get even easier.