How to Create a Reusable Weekly Meal Planner

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.

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

Instructions

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

Tips & Warnings

• For your healthy home-prepared meal ideas, go to recipes.com

• For your home-prepared meal, try NOT to serve the leftovers the day after it was first prepared (just to decrease groaning from the family).

• For your prepackaged/crock meal, add a bag of frozen vegetables to increase the nutritional value.

• For salad night, search online for entree salad recipes from your favorite restaurants and give it a try!

• For bar and grill food night, search online for healthy appetizer foods from your favorite restaurants and give it a try.

• Once you have a month's worth of meals, just repeat the same menus throughout the year. You can always change up any of the meals easily as long as you have the general template.

Resources

• Justthankful's Articles About Home and Work Life
• The Best Healthy Living Advice You Have NOT Heard