Planning healthy meals every week while considering the budget is challenging. Writing your weekly meal plan can help you save on grocery costs; you can get all the things that you need in one go plus plan for similar ingredients to save preparation time and money.
Making the Planner
Start with a simple piece of paper with sections for each day of the week. Divide each day into three or four meals, depending on your eating patterns. Fill each box with an assigned meal, although you need not be strict when following the order of the meals. Plan to have common ingredients in your weekly meals so that you can save some for later use.
Planning for Breakfast
Plan your meals so that there are common ingredients across the different dishes, so that you can share that package of cheese, for example. For breakfast, you can prepare cheese quiches beforehand and just toast them in the oven when you are ready to eat. These candouble as snacks for school or to bring to work. Macaroni and cheese with some crisped bacon bits can also be a breakfast meal. You can substitute bacon with ham, too, especially if you had ham from a previous dish.
Planning for Lunch
Plan to have at least two dishes that share the same meat ingredient when planning for lunches or dinners in a week. For example, plan to make lemon and herb chicken for Monday lunch with some steamed rice and green beans. Use the leftover chicken and rice as fried rice for dinner, or use chicken that you bought but didn't cook for baked parmesan chicken for Wednesday lunch.
Planning for Dinner
The same principle follows for dinner, but since you may have more time to prepare dinner dishes, you can make more side dishes and use them for lunch the next day. For example, if you make pepperoni pizza for Tuesday's dinner, use the extra pepperoni to make sausage pasta for dinner on Thursday. Baked pork chops on a Wednesday night paired with carrots and celery sticks with ranch dressing can, with just a few more vegetables tossed in, become roasted pork salad for Friday night.
Planning the Snacks
Make snacks during the weekend and freeze or refrigerate them; this makes preparation time faster and more cost effective. Write down all the things that you will need within the week so that you can all buy them in one trip. Frozen blueberries can be shared between blueberry muffins and blueberry toppings for your cereal, for example.
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