The fresh produce always went to waste because we didn’t have a planned use for them. Before meal planning, we would go shopping, find great looking ingredients and come home exhausted and order delivery because it was too exhausting to cook! Ha. An added bonus for is that we never buy more than we need at the grocery store. Seems pretty simple, right? It really is! We love having a strategy for the week and it takes out the anxiety of each evening. If it’s a leftover in the freezer, I pull out the item and place it in the fridge to defrost it. But before I go to bed the night, I can take a quick look at our planner on the fridge. Another night OR two may have an item pulled out from the freezer. It’s a Friday night thing for us to go out. Please do not think that I’m advocating for cooking 7 days a week! Each week our meal planner usually has one dinner left blank.
#2016 monthly dinner menu calendar printable free
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To avoid leftover burn out, we always eat Sunday’s dinner for Tuesday’s lunch, etc… It all gets packed up after dinner Sunday, and anything remaining is labeled and tossed in the freezer for a meal later. Our meal planner lets us plan for when we will eat leftovers (hint its 2 days after we have it for dinner) during lunch. Some weeks we get really creative and try new recipes, other ones we just mange! We are big fans of saving money, so we rarely eat out for lunch. Every Sunday morning we browse the grocery store and see if anything on sale could be useful in a recipe this week. After all, the easiest thing to do is order out, right?Ībout four years ago we began meal planning. Maybe it’s just mine! All you can do is hope that you have all the ingredients for what popped up in your head and hope everyone will try a bite. I am convinced that toddlers seize that time of indecision and use it to wear down parents for fruit snacks. To me, there is nothing more stressful than coming home from work or spending the day with the kids and trying to plan for dinner. There is a version of the meal planner printable that starts on a Monday, and one that starts on a Sunday too.All families are busy. You can write your own dates in each circle and there is enough room to write breakfast lunch and dinners if you like. Our free printable meal planner template is a simple, one page, planner with enough room to plan for five weeks. I don’t need to get ti done before the first of the month, and when I fall of the menu planning bandwagon (because I always do now and then) I can just pick it back up again whenever I’m ready. Planning with a single sheet of paper and pencil (always a pencil so I can change things if needed!) means I can do my planning anywhere, and display it easily.Īnd using a planner that is undated means I can plan any time. There are so many great options for meal planners these days, you can even use a digital planner, but I like to have a paper menu plan, and something that is really flexible. To do that, I need to use a monthly menu plan.įind out how I meal plan for a month in half an hour here. This works really well for us, saves us time and money, if I am organised and plan ahead. Then I try to limit it to one shop per week for things like fruit, vegetables, bread, and milk.
I aim to do one big shop a month for all the staples and non-perishables. It means I spend more money and time than I should, and it’s a sign that I am totally unorganised. I went to the shops almost every day last week. This monthly meal planner template will help take the trauma out of deciding what is for dinner each night! If you are trying to get organised and stay on top of family meals and grocery shopping, this free printable monthly menu plan is a great way to start.
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