Meal Planning Made Easy

Meal planning sounds simple enough: decide what you're going to eat this week and write it down.

But anyone who has actually planned meals for a family knows there's a lot more hiding inside that one little task.

You have to think of meals everyone will eat, check your schedule, figure out what you already have, make a grocery list, remember which nights are busy, and somehow avoid buying ingredients that sit untouched in the refrigerator.

And then you get to cook everything.

The good news is that meal planning gets much easier when you stop treating every week like a completely new problem to solve.

A few simple systems can cut down the number of decisions you have to make and help you get dinner on the table without spending half the week thinking about it.

How to Make Meal Planning Easier

Plan Around Your Schedule First

Before choosing a single recipe, look at what your family has going on that week.

A night filled with sports, appointments, or activities probably isn’t the best time to plan a dinner that takes an hour to prepare.

Match your meals to your actual week.

Busy nights might get slow cooker meals, sandwiches, leftovers, or something you can prepare ahead. Save meals that require more preparation for evenings when you’ll actually have the time.

This one habit can prevent a lot of abandoned meal plans.

Let Your Family Help Choose

You don’t have to be responsible for thinking of every dinner yourself.

Ask each person in your family to choose a meal for the week.

Not only does this give you fewer meals to come up with, but people are usually much happier about dinner when they’ve had some say in what appears on the table.

You can still balance those choices with vegetables, sides, and the other foods you want your family eating.

If asking everyone an open-ended question results in a chorus of “I don’t know,” give them a short list instead.

“Would you rather have tacos, spaghetti, or chicken tonight?” is usually much easier to answer than “What do you want for dinner?”

Give Your Nights a Theme

Theme nights are one of my favorite ways to make meal planning faster because you’re narrowing the choices before you even start.

Your week might include:

• Taco or Mexican night
• Pasta night
• Slow cooker night
• Breakfast-for-dinner night
• Leftovers night
• Pizza night
• Family favorite night

You don’t have to follow the themes every week. They’re simply a shortcut when you can’t think of what to make.

Instead of choosing from every dinner you’ve ever eaten, you’re choosing from a much smaller group.

Build a List of Family Favorites

One of the biggest meal-planning mistakes is assuming you need new recipes all the time.

You don’t.

If your family happily eats 20 or 30 dinners, you’ve already created most of the meal-planning system you need.

Keep a running list of meals your family likes. You can use a notebook, a note on your phone, a spreadsheet, recipe cards, or whatever system you’re most likely to maintain.

I also like rating new recipes.

After trying something new, ask everyone what they thought. If a meal gets consistently high marks, add it to your favorites list.

Eventually you’ll have your own collection of reliable meals instead of staring at hundreds of recipes every week wondering which ones might work.

Check Your Kitchen Before You Plan

Before deciding what to make, take a quick look through your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry.

Start with food that needs to be used soon.

If you already have chicken in the freezer, half a bag of potatoes, and vegetables that need to be eaten, that’s not just food you own. It’s the beginning of this week’s meal plan.

Planning from what you already have can also help you avoid buying duplicates or letting perfectly good food go unused.

Plan Leftovers on Purpose

Leftovers don’t have to be the accidental containers collecting in the back of your refrigerator.

Make them part of the plan.

You might cook extra chicken one night and use the remaining chicken for wraps, salads, soup, or another meal later in the week.

Or simply designate one evening as leftovers night.

That gives you one fewer dinner to prepare and helps use food you’ve already spent time and money making.

Always Have an Emergency Dinner

No meal plan survives every week exactly as written.

Someone gets home late. An appointment runs long. You forget to thaw something. You look at the dinner you planned and realize you simply don’t have the energy for it.

That’s why I always recommend keeping one or two emergency meals available.

Choose dinners your family likes that require very little preparation and use ingredients you can easily keep in your freezer or pantry.

My Easy Tortellini Dinner is one example. Chicken Enchilada Cups are another meal you can keep many of the ingredients on hand for.

Your emergency meal doesn’t have to be impressive. Its only job is to give you an easy answer when the original plan isn’t going to happen.

Stop Rebuilding the Whole System Every Week

At some point, you can only simplify meal planning so much if you’re still responsible for making every decision yourself.

You still have to choose the meals.

Find the recipes.

Figure out the servings.

Make the grocery list.

Remember what you already have.

Keep track of the preparation.

That’s exactly why I created the Family Meal Plan Club.

Instead of giving every family the same premade menu, the Family Meal Planner builds your weekly plan around your household.

You can set up your family information, create your weekly meal plan, adjust servings, swap meals you don’t want, account for ingredients you already have, and get an organized grocery list connected to the meals you’ve chosen.

Your recipes, ingredients, serving information, prep notes, and weekly plan stay together instead of being scattered across several places.

You can keep everything online or print the portions of your plan you want.

See how the Family Meal Plan Club works →

Use a Printable Meal Planner

If you’d rather plan everything yourself on paper, use my Printable Meal Planner to keep your weekly menu and grocery list together.

The important thing isn’t whether you use paper or a digital planner.

It’s having one place where you can see what you’re eating and what you need.

Don’t Try to Plan a Perfect Week

A good meal plan should make your week easier, not give you another schedule you feel obligated to follow perfectly.

Plans change.

You may move Tuesday’s dinner to Thursday. You might decide you’re too tired to cook and pull out your emergency meal. There may be enough leftovers that you don’t need to make one of the dinners you planned.

That’s fine.

The value of meal planning isn’t following every detail exactly.

It’s knowing what your options are before someone asks, “What’s for dinner?”

Once you have a handful of family favorites, a few shortcuts, some backup meals, and a simple planning routine, that question gets much easier to answer.

And if the planning itself is the part you’d happily hand over, take a look at the Family Meal Plan Club. It gives you one organized place to build the week’s meals, recipes, grocery list, and prep information around the way your family actually eats.erything you need at your fingertips.