6 Ways to Change Up Your Meal Planning

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Meal planning can be such a drag. It has to be done every week and we need to make time for it to happen. But the alternative is if we don’t meal plan, we scramble each day and try to figure out what we’re going to make.

And it’s stressful if you wait until 5:00 at night and then decide what to make for dinner. I’ve done that! And so many times, we decide on a meal to make but then realize we don’t have all the ingredients to make it. So what’s left to do? Go out to eat again.

But when we take the time to meal plan (and it honestly doesn’t have to take long if you don’t have the time), we’re so much better off through the week. We know what we need to cook each night, we’ve already shopped for the ingredients, and we remember the night before to take any meat out of the freezer to thaw. Everything is planned and when dinner time rolls around (which it does every night) all our planning pays off. Our meat is thawed, we have everything to cook the meal, and in no time we’ll have a home cooked meal on the table. All because we took the time to plan.

There are some options though to meal planning. Of course, there is the traditional way of meal planning by taking some time on Sunday (or when is convenient for you) and plan out your week using all of your current recipes. But if that way doesn’t appeal to you, here are a few other ideas that you can try.

 

Six Ways to Meal Plan

 

1. Start a collection of your favorite recipes. By having a collection of these meals, meal planning won’t take much time since they are right at your fingertips. You can either put them into a recipe binder or keep them together online.

 

Related: 7 Reasons Why You Need to Meal Plan

 

2. Meal planned weeks. With this idea, you plan out as many weeks as you can with the recipes you have, and then when it’s time to plan for the week, use one of the weeks that you’ve already planned out. Just don’t throw them away once the week is over. This is one of the quickest ways to meal plan since your weeks are already written out. And depending on how many recipes you have this could mean many weeks of different meal plans. All you need to do is rotate them each week.

 

3. Use Evernote’s tagging system. Evernote is an online organization website that lets you collect anything you want. I love to use it for recipes because it organizes them by using notebooks and tags. I organize my recipes into two categories (or notebooks), which are recipes I’ve tried and recipes I want to try. Then for each recipe, I tag words that associate with that recipe. For example, if I’m adding a Crockpot Chicken Tortilla Soup, I could tag crockpot, chicken, and soup. Then, when I wanted to look up soup recipes that have chicken, this recipe would come up as well as any other recipes that have chicken and soup (that I’ve tagged this way). If you’d like more information on Evernote and how to organize your recipes, I’ve written up a post to help you.

 

 

4. Plan a theme for each night. Give each night a theme, like Meatless Mondays or Taco Tuesdays, and when it’s time to meal plan, plan a recipe that goes with that theme. This takes more work but it’s a fun idea if you want to use your creativity by coming up with the different theme names and planning your meal plan this way.

 

5. Swap meals. With this idea, you swap meals and its leftovers. For example, make a meal Monday night, eat the leftovers Tuesday night, make a meal Wednesday night, and then eat the leftovers Thursday night and so on. With this type of meal planning, you’d only need to come up with 3-4 meals per week.

 

Related: Over 20 Tips and Tricks to Save the Most at Grocery Stores

 

6. Take out the decision. Some of us hate making decisions on what to eat each night (this is me). If that’s the case, write all your recipes on small pieces of paper and throw them into a bucket or bowl. Then just pick one at random and that’s what you’re eating on the first night of your meal plan. Then just keep picking them at random and adding them to your meal plan for the week. There are no decisions to make so all you need to do is get the ingredients and make the meal.

 

 

Final Thought

 

I hope one of these ideas has inspired you to meal plan. Meal planning doesn’t have to take long or be complicated. You’ll save so much time each week by knowing what you’re making each day. You’ll save money from not eating out. And you’ll have a calmer week because your meals are already planned out.

If you haven’t a clue what you’re making tonight or tomorrow night, pick one of these ideas and start meal planning. You’ll be happy when 5:00 rolls around and you know what your family is eating for dinner.

 

Do you know any other ways to meal plan?

 

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