How to meal plan strategically

Whether every few days or every few weeks, meal planning is when you think about what you’ll be eating in advance, make a plan, and stick to it.

Especially when raising a family, meal planning is essential. It helps you reduce waste, minimize your food budget, save time, and limit your stress.

Figuring out a good system that works for you can take a few tries and can always be refined. Here are some strategies that will help optimize or make meal planning easier.

Consult your calendar first.

Check to see if you have any events coming up that week. Oh, and make sure to confer with your partner, too.

You may realize that there will be days you don’t need to cook or maybe days when dinner will be rushed. You can plan ahead to have something in a slow cooker or pre prepared, ready for dinner after a busy day.

Ask your family what they like to eat.

I love having short interviews with my kids about what they’d like to eat. It’s great to involve them in food selection and planning and helps develop healthy relationships with food.

Asking first is also a great way to please your family and have them eat what you make.

Think seasonally.

This will help you save money. A strawberry salad in February is definitely not the most cost effective way to eat.

It’s the fall now. Embrace winter squash, root veggies, and roasts. Think stews, soups, and chilis.

Embrace freezer meals.

This is the ultimate time saver. I know some moms who prep 30 meals one day each month. Basically, they only “cook” one day per month.

A freezer meal is when you prepare food, usually raw, beforehand. It’s frozen in a gallon ziplock bag or other container. When you’re ready to use it, thaw and cook.

Freezer meals are excellent for the colder months, when fresh veggies are limited and more expensive and your home would benefit from the heat of one pot meals.

Use your slow cooker.

The slow cooker is amazing for busy days. Stick something in in the morning, and you come home to a hot home-cooked meal.

Slow cooker meals are really easy to prep, too. Some of my favorite slow cooker meals are roasts, stews, and chilis, which are especially amazing in the winter.

Utilize transformative meals.

In my mind, many meals come in pairs. For example, almost every time I roast a chicken, I make chicken soup. Or, transforming leftover stir fry into a frittata. Or, making pizza with leftover pasta sauce. Plan for this, and it will change your life.

Mix it up with spices.

The same meal can taste totally different depending on the spices you use. Consider an easy chicken veggie stir fry. Adding cumin and chili powder will give it a Mexican flavor. Add some curry for an Indian flavor. Or adding basil, oregano, and parsley gives an Italian flavor. I try to buy all my herbs in bulk to save on high quality herbs.

Plan for leftovers.

Include leftovers in your meal plan. They make great breakfasts or lunches. Or, make double so you cook two nights of dinner in one blow.

Prep ingredients ahead of time.

I do this a lot. I might chop veggies in the morning for that night’s meal. When it’s time to cook in the evening (when my kids have an abundance of needs), all I have to do is throw it in the pan.

Prepping ingredients works really well for packing lunches. If I already have the chicken cubed, peppers sliced, and drinkable yogurt poured into a small container, all I need to do is load the lunchbox.

Go with theme nights.

This can make meal planning easier and fun. Taco night, surf & turf, breakfast for dinner, casserole night, slow cooker night, kids cooking night, homemade pizza night, Asian-inspired cuisine night, sandwich night… the list could be quite long.

Don’t overstuff the refrigerator.

It’s so easy to do this. However, it’s so overwhelming and nearly impossible to use it all. With meal planning, you should be buying exactly what you need for a certain period of time. No overstuffing. No overbuying.

Keep a well-stocked pantry and know what’s there.

A well organized pantry goes a long way when it comes to optimizing your food budget and meal plan. Know what essentials you use and what to always keep in stock.

Make a shopping list.

This is essential. Once you make your plan, look through your fridge, freezer, and pantry. Anything you do not have, add to your list. Then do your shopping. Do not deviate from the list. And, please, never shop while hungry.

Keep a meal journal.

Although I personally prefer a white board on the fridge, there are major benefits to journaling your meal planning. You can look back and see what you did before, what worked and didn’t work. On a lazy week, you could simply repeat what you did before.

Have a template.

You don’t need to start from scratch every week. Having a basic outline for what types of meals you’d like is a great baseline for meal planning. Here’s an example:

• 1-2 stir frys
• 1 salad
• 1 slow cooker or soup meal
• 1 fish/seafood meal
• 1-2 meals from a different cuisine from around the world
• 1-2 prepare ahead oven meals

Hungry yet? Happy meal planning, folks!