How to Create a Reusable Weekly Meal Planner

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By Justthankful
User-Submitted Article

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For busy families, meal planning and shopping can be hard and lead to extra dining out expenses (and a little stress sometimes). This article provides a healthy and, potentially cheaper, remedy for weekday meal planning.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

A hungry family
Typical weekly schedule
Idea for 1 healthy pre-packaged or crockpot meal
Idea for 1 healthy home-cooked meal
Idea for 1 healthy entree dinner salad
Idea for healthy bar and grill type foods for a platter family meal

Step 1

Pick your 2 busiest weekday nights from your typical weekly schedule. Assign the prepackaged/crockpot meals and the entree dinner salad to those 2 nights. Recruit help from other family menus to get the prepackaged and entree dinner salads going if they arrive home in the evenings before you. For the crockpot meals, pop them in before you leave in the morning.
Step 2

Pick 1 day of the week that you have at least one hour to prepare a homecooked meal. Prepare enough of that meal for 2 nights. Assign that meal to 2 nights (night one will be the night you prepare it and the other night, you can eat the leftovers)
Step 3

Pick a night that you have about 30 minutes to prepare a few bar and grill type appetizers. Assign that meal to 1 night.
Step 4

Make a shopping list based on the 5-day dinner menu planned in the previous steps and go shopping.
Step 5

File this 5-day dinner menu and shopping list in a place that you can refer to it frequently. An electronic file in Microsoft Word is a good idea. You can modify the menu and shopping list for the remaining 3 weeks of the month.