One of the complaints of meal planning is there is no room for leftovers so you either end up with food waste, or you end up giving up because there’s too much food. If we set unrealistic tight schedules for ourselves, we could miss out on some pretty amazing opportunities and spontaneous plan changes.Ī great way to easily add flexibility into your week is having a scheduled leftover night. Move your menu back a day or do some switching so you can go out for dinner and still make use of your fresh ingredients before they spoil. You’ve planned your meals for the next week, purchased ingredients and suddenly you get an invite out to dinner with friends. We are trying to make life easier, not serve meals 4. Not everything needs to be a gourmet meal. It sounds great but unless you really love to cook, it’s a lot of unnecessary pressure.ĭon’t feel guilty about using a pre-made recipe base or ready to heat foods in your meal plan mix to save time. Sometimes we get caught up in that perfect housewife ideal and want to give our family a fancy, made from scratch dining extravaganza every night. When meal planning for beginners, you may want to skip new recipes entirely during your first couple of weeks. We tend to plan bigger dinners or new recipes on the weekend when we don’t have work or school, so we can kick off our prep earlier and make an evening out of it. Do this maybe once a week or a night when you have some extra time up your sleeve. KEEP IT SIMPLEĮxperimenting with a new recipe is great fun, but it can be time-consuming. You can find a master recipe printable in my mega meal planning bundle available in my store, along with loads of other useful meal planning printable pages to keep you organised: 2. This is the place you draw your weekly meal planning inspiration from. These meals will form the start of your meal plan and this will be your meal plan master list.
These are the meals you already make confidently and enjoy. This isn’t the time to come up with new recipes or things to try. CREATE A RECIPE MASTER LISTīefore you do anything else, grab a notepad and write down every simple meal or family favourite recipe you have in your typical rotation already. Here are the best tips to start meal planning for beginners: 1. Family Meal Planning Tips To Help You SucceedĪ meal plan does not have to be so stressful or strict. Having a disorganised refrigerator doesn’t help either! So make sure you check out these fridge organisation tips before you get started. The fresh ingredients start to lose their freshness and you run the risk of wasting them entirely. Tomorrow night comes and that huge complex meal still seems like more effort than you’re prepared for mid-week. You plan to make it tomorrow night instead. We tend to make things more difficult for ourselves by approaching it as a whole, rather than in parts.īy the time you get home from work or school pick up or whatever else it is that has given you a busy crazy day, the last thing you want to do is create that dinner masterpiece you planned 3 weeks ago!Ĭalling out for pizza sounds so much more appealing right now! Am I right? Often when your meal planning fails, it’s because you feel overwhelmed.
So I learned how to simplify the meal planning process to suit our household.
I’m a spontaneous person, so planning ahead with things such as weekly meal plans was a big adjustment. Not all of us are great with strict routines and schedules. Sometimes it can be overwhelming planning life down to such specific detail. Yet so many people who try planning meals fail… Badly. Meal planning comes with so many useful benefits, from saving money by wasting less, saving time and taking some of the stress out of an already busy schedule.