Meal Planning Made Easy
by Rachel Paxton
Description: Tips for making meal planning easier.
It's no fun trying to decide what to make for dinner every night.
Planning your meals ahead of time often saves you time as well as
money.
There are many different ways to plan your meals. How you plan
yours depends on how much time you want to spend now to save
yourself time later.
I plan my meals once a week. Because I have limited
refrigerator/freezer space and a small family to feed (3), this
plan seems to work best for me. I only go to the grocery store
once a week. When I'm getting ready to go to the store, I sit
down and starting planning my menu for the next week.
This is a good time to go through this week's grocery ads to see
what's on sale this week. I also take this time to clean out my
refrigerator to see what needs thrown away and what can be
re-used as leftovers in the next couple of days. Cleaning out
your refrigerator weekly is crucial in avoiding wasting food that
could still be used to make a perfectly good meal.
So after I've cleaned out the refrigerator and scanned the
grocery store ads, I start my shopping list. I try to plan around
what I already have in the freezer. For example, if I know I have
a pound of hamburger in the freezer and I know I have spaghetti
noodles on hand, then I just need to put spaghetti sauce on my
list in order to have spaghetti for dinner one night.
I've also found that often we don't need as much meat in our
meals as you might think. For our family of three, a pound of
hamburger can be used for both spaghetti and tacos. If I cook the
hamburger all at once, I can just put half of it in the
refrigerator for the next meal (a big time savings!). If I
already have taco shells on hand all I need is to make sure that
the sour cream I have in the refrigerator is still good and put
lettuce and tomatoes on my shopping list.
You should always stock up on meat when it's on sale. If you do
you'll find that some weeks you'll end up buying almost no meat
at all, if any. I also stock up on items like jars of spaghetti
sauce when they're on sale. Then I'll always have a quick dinner
ready on a moment's notice if I already have hamburger (also
bought on sale) and spaghetti noodles on hand.
Some weeks I realize that I already have much of what I'm going
to need for the week. Some of the staples I keep on hand: sour
cream, cheese, taco shells, spaghetti noodles, egg noodles, cream
of mushroom soup, onions, potatoes, garlic, tuna, spaghetti
sauce, tomato sauce, black olives, canned clams, and rice. These
ingredients make a lot of the meals we eat, like: hamburger and
rice, beef stroganoff, tacos, spaghetti, clam chowder, and
hamburger gravy and mashed potatoes.
I usually plan for only 5 meals a week. I know that sometime
during the week we'll be eating leftovers or fending for
ourselves due to time constraints.
This system has worked really well for me and saved us lots of
money. I plan once a week, shop once a week, and don't give a
thought to meal planning for the rest of the week. And I don't
hold myself to cooking a certain meal on a certain night. I
usually decide that day what I'm going to cook for dinner to be a
little flexible.
There are many other ways you can plan your meals. Some people
cook once a month and freeze their meals for later use (requires
a lot of freezer space). A couple of books on this subject are
Frozen Assets by Deborah Taylor Hough and The Freezer Cooking
Manual by Tara Wohlenhaus.
Meal planning doesn't have to be hard. Modify your plan to suit
your family's needs. Just make sure you HAVE a plan. It will
inevitably save you time as well as money.
Originally published at Suite 101. Rachel Paxton is a freelance writer and mom who is the author of
What's for Dinner?, an e-cookbook containing more than 250 quick
easy dinner ideas. For recipes, tips to organize your home, home
decorating, crafts, holiday hints, and more, visit Creative
Homemaking at http://www.creativehomemaking.com.
