Ready to get better at meal planning? Check out this complete Guide to Meal Planning including free tools and tips to make dinner time (and life) easier.
Why Meal Plan?
Save money, reduce dinnertime stress, and streamline grocery shopping, saving you time. It will make your evenings feel so much less chaotic.
Meal Planning Tips and Tools
Let me show you my simple meal-planning process and I have some free tools for you too. Follow along until you learn what works for you and your family.
How to Create a Meal Plan
Create your own weekly meal plan, following these steps:
Step 1: Print Your Meal Planner
Get my printable meal planner. It's free when you subscribe to my emails or buy it here for $1. It's a PDF so you can print out a fresh copy each week or laminate it. I use a home laminator and a thin dry erase marker to fill it out.
I like to plan my week on Sundays and order groceries for the week that day. But choose a day that works for you.
Pro tip: Create a command center. Clip your meal plan to the fridge or use a corkboard with large clips. Having a designated spot for your meal plan will help you get into a routine of planning ahead.
Step 2: Find Dinner Ideas
Start with meals you already know your family loves but if you want to add something exciting to your menu for the week week, flip through my seasonal cookbooks to get recipe ideas.
You can also browse my 200+ easy dinner recipes to find recipe to try.
Step 3: Fill in Your Week
Fill in each day of the week with the meals you want to make. You can add dinners only or include lunch and breakfast too.
Pro Tip: Pick at least one day each week to rest and eat up leftovers!
Pencil in your meals so you can make changes. Or, as I mentioned, laminate your meal plan to wipe and make changes and also reuse it, week to week.
My printable meal planner is FREE when you sign up for my emails. Sign up now if you haven't already!
Step 4: Print Recipes
I like to print and hang up recipes I'm making for the week, underneath the meal plan. This helps everyone know what's coming for dinner. I also save the printed recipes that everyone like in our Favorite Recipes binder.
If you're choosing dinner recipes from my website or another website, look for the printer icon in the recipe card to print. My seasonal cookbook is designed to be printed, just print the recipe page(s) you plan to make.
Need a printer or ink? Shop home printers and printer ink on amazon.
Step 4: Order Groceries
I highly recommend ordering groceries online for pick up or delivery. It's such a time saver and prevents impulse buys too.
If you're more of an in-person shopper, use the bottom of my meal planner to make your list. Otherwise use your grocery store app to create your grocery order.
If you use Walmart for your groceries, I do have a convenient link to shop Walmart for groceries, located in the recipe card of every recipe on this website.
If you're using recipes from my cookbooks, the groceries are shopped for you! Each recipe page looks like this, with a QR code:
Use your phone's camera to scan the QR code.
Pro Tip: I order all my groceries for the week, on Sunday and then group ingredients by recipe using clear fridge bins.
Online grocery ordering is currently only offered through Walmart. You must have the Walmart app or use Walmart.com for this to work. Mighty Mrs. is an official #WalmartPartner.
Step 5: Start Cooking!
This is the fun part! Cook and enjoy a delicious meal with friends or family.
Step 6: Save Your Favorite Recipes
Did you try a new recipe and your family loved it? Save it to make again! Check out my shop for everything you need to make a Favorite Recipes binder.
Why You'll Love Weekly Meal Planning
30-day meal plans just aren't realistic.
A 30-day meal plan is great in theory but really hard to make work especially for busy families who have schedules that differ every day, week-to-week.
It's flexible.
Helping you try a few new recipes a month is the goal of my seasonal cookbook. Low pressure, more realistic and achievable! Some weeks you might have time to try new recipes, other weeks you might not. Meal planning week-to-week allows you to fit meals with your schedule.
If you need additional dinner ideas beyond the ones featured in my seasonal cookbook, don't worry. I have plenty more! Browse 200+ easy dinner recipes and Pin your favorites or go ahead and print them out.
You can repeat meals.
Feel free to repeat the same recipe if it's one you really love!
School cafeterias and restaurants repeat meals all the time! Why? It's efficient.
Chances are, you're going to skip making dinner here and there in favor of eating out or popping in a frozen pizza, so repeats won't actually even be that common.
Why repeating meals works:
- You’ll start to memorize the recipes, making prep faster and more flexible.
- Picky eaters get more chances to warm up to new foods.
- It adds comfort and routine to dinner time.
- Simplifies grocery shopping.
- Leftovers and ingredients get used up, saving money.
- After a while, everyone will be ready for something new!
★ FAQs ★
Everyone may not love every single meal and that's OK. Feel free to customize the recipe to your family's liking. I have suggestions for substitutes on each recipe. The best way I have found to accommodate picky eaters is to offer the meal deconstructed. Set aside some plain pasta without sauce, offer raw veggies instead of cooked, and generally keep ingredients separate so the picky eater can try each item individually.
Many time dinner leftovers can be taken for lunch. Or if you want something special, browse my lunch recipes.
Browse all my easy breakfast recipes here. Some of my breakfast recipes can be frozen and heated for easy to-go meals.
Depending on your family size and how many leftovers you want, you can adjust the servings using the sliding scale on each of my recipes.
The menu is a PDF which you can download as a file and open it with Acrobat Reader or you can just open the PDF in your browser.
Open your phone camera, point it at the QR code so it appears on your phone screen. This will automatically generate a link you can tap.
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