Planning your family's meals can cut stress, give you more time each day and even help your family to eat healthier foods. This is because with a meal plan you can easily gauge whether your family is eating enough foods from each food group, notes the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You may even find that planning meals for your family saves you money and gives you more time to spend with your family. Choose old favorites and new dishes to create a meal plan and shopping list to save you stress.
Step 1
Start at the beginning of the week and obtain a current calendar, suggests working mom website WAHM.com. You can use your family's regular calendar, or use one that you've printed from the Internet that is set aside for meal planning only. Choose one that has large spaces for each day.
Step 2
Get out your recipe books, cards and clippings and organize them into piles. Choose everyday recipes for one pile, which contains the recipes that you know your family already loves. Then set aside another pile for new recipes that you think your family would like to try. Put the rest in separate pile for recipes that you don't want to use.
Step 3
Begin inserting recipes for each day of the week. You may also choose to plan bi-weekly or even monthly. Make sure that you scatter your regular recipes with a few new ones, and add one day each week for "leftover night" where you can use up the food left from other nights. Arrange recipes so that you can also use leftovers from one night's dinner in the next. Add suggestions for lunches and breakfasts as well, but stick to items that you can make from memory.
Step 4
Create a weekly shopping list from your calendar. You should be able to easily see which recipe you plan on making each day, along with the breakfasts and lunches. Write down the non-pantry ingredients for each recipe to create a shopping list, and then head to the store to pick up everything you'll need for a week's worth of meals.
Step 5
Follow your meal plan each day so that you don't have to worry about what to make for your family to eat. Stick to the plan as closely as possible, and keep track of new recipes that your family enjoyed so that next month, you can add them to your everyday recipes list.
Things You'll Need
- Calendar
- Pen
- Recipe book
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