A Peek Inside our Meal Planning Process {Updated}

Meal planning is crucial in making our week run smoothly.  It’s so nice to come home from work knowing what we will be having for dinner.  It also helps us plan accordingly on busy nights when my husband and I can delegate who is going to cook.  Meal planning keeps our food budget in check, since there are rarely last minute trips to the grocery store for “a few items” or multiple nights of takeout.   There are many ways to meal plan and there is no one tried and true method.  You really have to figure out what works best for your family. I am showing you how I create our weekly meal plan which will hopefully give you some tips and inspiration.

1.  The Calendar:  You can find fancy, online printable menus if that will help motivate you or you like things to look pretty. For meal planning, I do not go the fancy route.  As seen above, I use the back of a piece of scrap paper and set up a monthly calendar.  I plan our menus weekly and write the meals in pencil, so I can erase and move things around if needed. It’s a constant work-in-progress with lots of erasing and moving things around.

2.  The Day:  Deciding what day you want your meal plan to start on is up to you and your schedule. We do our weekly grocery shopping at Shoprite. The new sale circular begins on Sundays, so over the weekend I write out the menu and make the grocery list.  Then Sunday mornings, my husband and I do the shopping together.

3.  Time:  Meal planning does take a little bit of time.  Especially in the beginning if you have never done it before.  One you’ve built up a library of recipes your family enjoys it will become much quicker to rotate those meals. It takes me a little bit longer, because I rarely, if ever make the same recipe twice.  It takes some time for me to go through my recipe resources (see below) and pick out the new recipes I want to make for the week.  However, my new routine is to get up early on Saturday morning, make myself a cup of coffee and sit on the couch watching a show while I work on the weekly meal plan. This past weekend, I was super productive and got most of November’s meal plan completed!

4.  The Planning:  If you are new to meal planning, it might be easier to start with some recipes that you know your family eats and enjoys and maybe aim for one new recipe a week.  I recommend you use your grocery store circular to start your planning.  If chicken is on sale this week, I recommend making at least one chicken dish and buying some extra chicken that you can freeze for the future.  Some people prefer to have a themed dinner for each day, like Meatless Monday or Taco Tuesday.  This helps in keeping a consistency to meal planning.  Although my meal plan varies from week to week, we always have homemade pizza on Friday nights.  Once I find a recipe that I decide I’m going to make, I write it in pencil on the calendar, along with the name of the source (blog name, magazine, website).  Although I will have my five recipes for the week written in, I won’t necessarily make them in that order.  When we eat each meal depends on factors like which dishes have produce that may spoil or how busy our schedules are.  I will then write in each box, what day I actually plan on making that dish.

5.  Grocery List:  After the meal plan is made I write the grocery list. I go through each recipe I plan on making for the week and write down the ingredients that I need.  I circle the recipe on the calendar to know that I made sure I had everything I needed for that recipe. I then go through the grocery store circular adding in all of the other items we need that week to the list. And that is my meal planning process!

Meal Planning Resources:

So, where can you find recipes? For starters, check out the resources right here on the blog! Although I stopped posting new ones, I have a page that includes 89 of our weekly menu plans and seven vegan meal plans that I have posted!

Food blogs have become my main source of dinner recipes. There are so many food blogs out there, ranging from family focused, quick and easy meals, to more involved recipe blogs. I subscribe to several food blogs and get new posts e-mailed to me. We are vegetarian and my main focus when meal planning is to find recipes that sound delicious but are quick and easy to make. 

 Here are a few food blogs that I use often and recommend:

Eats Well With Others – Joanne posts vegetarian recipes. I think I make at least one recipe of hers a week. She also posts a weekly meal plan post.

Half Baked Harvest, How Sweet Eats and Pinch of Yum are all great blogs with consistently good recipes.  I’ve rarely made a recipe from these blogs that wasn’t delicious.  Some of these recipes can be a bit involved or require a bunch of ingredients, so just review the recipe before deciding to make it.  While their blogs are not strictly vegetarian, they all post a good number of recipes that are.

Big Flavors from a Tiny Kitchen – My friend Ashley has been running her food blog since 2006! It is full of delicious recipes and a great resource if you’re not sure what to make!

For beginner cooks I also highly recommend the website allrecipes.com.  You can search for recipes by a number of different factors, including ingredients or name.  I’ve found most recipes that I’ve used from the site easy to make.  It’s especially helpful since there are tons of ratings and reviews.  If a recipe has lots of five star ratings, it’s probably going to be good.

Try cooking recipes from several different blogs.  You will eventually find you like certain bloggers’ recipe choices, presentation, photographs, etc. over others.  You don’t need to subscribe to all of them! I have two meal planning folders on my phone.  One is titled “Vegetarian recipes” and anytime I see a recipe I want to make I bookmark it there.  If I decide to make the recipe, I bookmark it in the “Cooking This Week” folder, so it’s easier to find when needed.

And don’t forget about Pinterest.  There are millions of recipes posted on that site.  Start creating boards of recipes that you see that interest you and you can refer to your board for inspiration when meal planning!

I’ve found that as much as I enjoy reading cookbooks, I don’t use them very often.  Most recipes can easily be found online. If you have a favorite cookbook, I’d love some recommendations!

I hope this helps give you a better idea on how to meal plan, if this is new to you!  Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments section or e-mail me.  I’d love to hear how others meal plan and am always looking for tips on how to make the process easier!