Meal Planning

I have meal planned in the past, but never really stuck with it. Now that I am meal planning again, I love it! I wanted to share a few tips with my readers.

The first thing that made the biggest difference in my meal planning success is the worksheet I use. If it is not easy to use, I'm not going to use it! I will be offering my meal planning worksheets for free to my readers soon. (So keep checking back!)

The second most important thing is to schedule time each week to plan your meals. I find doing any more than a week's worth of meals at a time is overwhelming. I do my meal planning on Friday's and my shopping on the weekend. But if you don't schedule time to do this then it usually never gets done.

I also discovered that meal planning is great when mom is not home! I had to leave home for a retreat this weekend and I planned all the meals for my husband. I made sure he had all the ingredients he needed and that it was easy, nourishing meals. This sure beat my family eating fast food all weekend! Here is the menu that I planned for my husband:

Friday
Dinner - Roast and Fresh Spinach. I started the roast in my slow cooker Friday morning. All he had to do was cook up the spinach and serve.

Saturday
Breakfast - Granola. I made some the morning before.
Snack - Fruit
Lunch - leftovers. We usually eat the week's leftovers on Friday's for lunch. I just saved the leftover day for Saturday so all he had to do was heat up the food.
Snack - dried sausage
Dinner - Fajitas. I had defrosted the pre-seasoned fajita meat. My husband loves to cook outside on the pit, so this was fun for him.

Sunday
Breakfast - cereal. I don't usually buy cereal, but I did for this occasion.
No snack because they were at church.
Lunch - bring coleslaw to the church potluck.
Snack - fruit
Dinner - dine out with mom.

Now my husband didn't follow it exactly, but he did real close. He didn't have to think about what to make them. I have to leave again this weekend to visit my sister and I have already planned out their meals. This worked great!