Meal Planning for Beginners {made super easy}

One thing I love doing every week, and something that has saved us lots of money, is meal planning.

There are so many ways to do meal planning. You can do weekly, biweekly or monthly schedules. You could do Sunday meal prep for the week, once a month cooking, freezer meals, bagged meals and slow cooker meals. If you are just starting out, trying to figure out what is right for your family can be overwhelming.

Let’s do what we can right now, in this season of life. Let’s figure out what will work for us and our family and not compare it to what others are doing!

Meal Planning Made Easy

Favorite Meals

The first thing to do is make a list of the favorite meals of your family, ones you know they like. These are the meals you’ll want to add in to your rotation on a regular basis.

Find a Planner

This step may be the hardest. There are so many options from pretty planners to just making a simple Word document to free printables from Pinterest. My suggestion would be to simplify this step as much as possible. Your meal planner doesn’t have to be pretty for it to be practicable and work. There are even meal planning apps you can download to your phone.

The easiest way I’ve found to meal plan is to make a weekly blog post with my meal plan for the week, but I know that isn’t feasible for everyone. If I didn’t have a blog to utilize, I would make my meal plan and display it in the kitchen either on the fridge or on a chalkboard. The easier it is to see, the easier it is to follow.

Here are a few links to some great choices:

Weekly Meal Planning Pad with Magnets – This is ideal, a weekly meal planning pad with magnets. It has a day-of-the-week section on the left with a shopping list section on the right. Make your meal plan, make your shopping list, tear the page off and take it grocery shopping with you. Easy peasy.
Meal Planning Calendar – This would be a great notebook to use to keep your meal planning organized. It has a section for meal plans, a shopping list, a note section and a section for your favorite recipes!
Dry Erase Magnetic Whiteboard for Fridge – This days-of-the-week magnetic whiteboard would be the perfect way to easily meal plan! With it on your fridge, it’s easily accessible to everyone in the family. And if your family is like mine and things magically go missing, this is harder to lose.
Barnwood Menu Chalkboard Sign – If I didn’t have a blog, I imagine I would use something like this. A cute, rustic chalkboard menu to hang on the wall in the kitchen. You can buy chalkboard markers that make writing super easy.

Start Planning

Once you have your planner, now it’s time to get planning those meals!

First, figure out how many days of the week you need to plan for. When I first started meal planning, I jumped in with both feet and planned all 7 days. If there was a day of the week I knew we would be getting take out, I would mark that on there as well.

Choose easy dinners that won’t overwhelm you. For example if you know you have to work late, don’t choose a meal that takes two hours from start to finish. The entire family (speaking from experience here) will be hangry by the time the meal gets to the table, yourself included. Check out my five ideas for easy dinners below.

If you aren’t sure where to start, take a look at the meal planning posts I have here on my blog. Most of the posts either include the recipe or links to the recipe.

Make sure to add one or two of your families favorite meals onto your meal plan for the week. If you have men in your family like the ones in mine, they prefer tried-and-tested meals over new ones I find on Pinterest.

Make Your Shopping List

Once you have your meals planned out, it’s time to make your shopping list. I would write the shopping list on a separate piece of paper, that way if it gets lost along the way your meal plan is still safe.

Try to limit how many times you run to the grocery store during the week. We’re all busy and plus you’ll save money by only going once. This also will help you stick to your meal plan and use up all of the food that you bought.

Keep Pantry Staples on Hand

Once you establish your meal planning and do it for a while, you’ll realize what your families staples are. When we think of pantry staples, we think of eggs, milk and bread. Those are definitely on my list, but there are many more items I’ve come to recognize as essential for my kitchen to be well stocked. It will make your weekly meal planning so much easier if you keep those staples on hand all of the time.

I’ll list some of our family staples below:

flour (I’m a bread machine addict y’all)
sugar
cheese
eggs
butter
instant mashed potatoes
rice
pasta
milk
cream soups (chicken and mushroom)

Five Ideas for Easy Dinners

1. Crock-Pot Meals

Oh, how I love me an easy peasy crock-pot dinner! If I know I have a lot of errands to run, appointments during the day or if I just want an easy dinner then crock-pot meals are the way to go.

Crock-pot meals (also known as a slow cooker) generally take anywhere between 5 – 8 hours to cook so prepare accordingly. You can throw something into the crock-pot and come back 8 hours later to dinner being done.

I love this because crock-pot meals tend to be comfort food. We all love yummy comfort food! You can pair it with a simple side or salad and have dinner ready to go in minutes.

Examples we love: roast, beef and broccoli, creamy potato chowder, pierogies, bbq ham

Check out my Crock-Pot Pinterest Board here

2. Casseroles

Casseroles have changed my life y’all, and they always seem to be my go-to. They are quick, easy to throw together with very little prep and super yummy! Normally, there is enough left over for my husband to take for his lunch the next day. And if there is a lot left over, it’s easy to throw in the freezer for a quick, easy future meal!

Casseroles are a great way to make an amazing meal with few ingredients. And once you have the hang of it, you could even create your own casserole with what you have on hand in your pantry. As long as one of those ingredients is cheese, a must have for a yummy casserole!

Examples we love: tater tot casserole, bubble pizza, chicken pie, chili cheese dog bake

Check out my Casserole Pinterest Board here

3. 15 Minute Meals

Where we live, the nearest McDonalds is 30 minutes away. So even eating out takes planning. When I’m short on time but need to cook the family a meal, 15 minute meals are the easiest!

This is usually the easiest type of meals for beginners to meal planning. You don’t need to prep them ahead, remember to defrost meat and there are no cooking skills involved.

Examples we love: sloppy joe grilled cheese, spaghetti, baked potatoes, oven baked chicken fingers and fries

Here is a link to Kraft’s 15 minute meals

4. Cooking Ahead and Freezing

Every time I have an upcoming surgery I take a day and cook a few different meals that are easily freezeable, put them in containers and freeze them. It makes life after surgery so much easier not only on me but on my family.

You could buy aluminum containers at the Dollar Store and get the casserole ready but don’t bake it. Freeze it and write instructions on the lid of how to cook it. You just need to remember to set it out to thaw ahead of time. And clean up couldn’t be easier!

Another thing I like to do is take a day and make homemade hot pockets and freeze them in individual bags. This makes a super easy lunch for my boys to grab on their way out the door. You can find my homemade hot pocket recipe here on my post of my favorite bread recipes.

Examples we love: hot pockets, chili, tater tot casserole, bbq pork

5. Canning

I absolutely love canning my own food! It saves me so much time and money throughout the year. I can everything from spaghetti sauce to chicken to crushed pineapple made from zucchini. I even canned all of our leftover turkey from Thanksgiving this year! It takes some time and a little getting used to but once you get the hang of it you’ll be canning up a storm. I have so many instructional blog posts that really walk you through so it’s not so scary. I’ll put links to some of my posts below.

Canned Baked Beans

Canning Chicken

Canning Homemade Chicken Broth

My 5 Favorite Canning Recipes

Five Ways to Prepare for Canning Season

And you can check out my Canning Pinterest Board here

Give Meal Planning a Try!

Using the simple steps above, meal planning doesn’t have to take longer than 5 minutes if you’re planning weekly like I do. And the best part is your kids won’t nag you about what’s for dinner any more, all they have to do is read the weekly meal plan and they’ll know! Mom win!