My Take on Meal Planning

Today I thought I would share a bit about how I plan meals for the week. I’m honestly pretty new at the whole meal planning game, but I can already see how much easier it makes life. Knowing what I’m making for dinner all week allows me to make sure I buy everything I need on my weekly shopping adventure. It also makes it a lot easier to remember to take the necessary meat out of the freezer on time. It does take a little time once a week to get it all planned out, but I think it’s a lot less time than I was spending in front of the cupboards hemming and hawing over what I was going to make that night. The boys also seem much happier with dinner now since I can plan ahead and get ingredients to make more unique meals. Really, this does seem to be pretty life-changing. I won’t say that it's going to last until it actually has, but I really hope I can follow through for the long term on this one.

So on to how I actually do my planning. When I first started meal planning I set every day with a theme (Italian, sandwiches, Mexican, etc), but I found that was too limiting for me. After some experimentation and thought I decided it was better to keep it simple. So now I have it set up on what meat we’ll be eating, and the days don’t matter. I plan out seven meals, look at my upcoming schedule and then plan the best way to put those meals in order. At this point we’re eating chicken twice a week, fish or vegetarian twice a week, and beef or pork the remaining three days. This works well at our household, but it’s easy to adapt to suit your personal tastes. Don’t eat pork? Just drop it to beef twice a week, and have chicken three nights a week. Easy peasy. It really can be adapted to work with any meat restrictions, or dislikes by just switching things around a bit.


In our household dinner almost always includes a starch, and I insist on vegetables or fruit every night (and throughout the day). I’m not a big fan of washing dishes, and we don’t have a dishwasher, so I usually try to use as few pans as possible. That means we have lots of one-pot-meals that have all those components included. This isn’t always possible, but I try for it when I can.

So with all that in mind I sit down and dive into my cookbooks and recipe websites for inspiration. Often I have some things bookmarked to try and I’ll start there to see if any of those ideas will work for the coming week. Once I get through those I move on and try to find other interesting recipes. I usually include a few meals that I can make up as I go along, or that I already have memorized to keep things simple for myself.

Once I have all our dinners laid out I check what I have in the pantry and the freezer/fridge and I build my shopping list for the week. I usually do all of this on Thursday, since Friday is typically my shopping day. Included in the shopping list is anything we might need for breakfast and lunch that week.


Breakfast is simple in our household. Most days we all have a smoothie, with banana, protein powder, frozen fruit, vanilla yogurt, and OJ. Occasionally I will make something more exciting on the weekends, and I try to plan ahead for that as well. Spontaneity does happen sometimes though. Lunch is also pretty simple; leftovers and/or snacks. Snacks include; fresh fruit and veggies, boiled eggs, meat, cheese, nuts, crackers, granola bars, etc. I try to keep most meals healthy, easy, and quick since I have a lot to do in a day, and there are things I’d rather spend those hours on. At least where breakfast and lunch are concerned. I usually invest a fair bit of time into dinner.

So that rounds out the how of my meal planning. Tomorrow I'll post my meal plan for the week, and my shopping list to illustrate how it ends up looking most weeks. I hope these posts help get you started on meal planning in your household and that you find it as useful as I have.

Thanks for stopping by! See you tomorrow!