Meal Planning: The Key to Tasty, Healthy, Inexpensive Eating

Meal planning is not only an easy way to keep your grocery budget in line, it’s also the best way to make sure that your family eats healthy, inexpensive meals at home rather than having to resort to take out.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind before planning your week’s menu:

1. Aim for planning one or two weeks’ worth of meals. While some people are able to plan a month in advance, planning one or two weeks is more manageable for most people.

2. Make a plan for leftovers. A once a week leftover and/or sandwiches night can help reduce waste and gives the cook a break, too.

3. Mix it up. Family favorites are great, especially if you have picky eaters, but throw a new dish or two in each week, too. Plan to try new recipes on nights that aren’t especially hectic.

4. However, be conscious of trying too many recipes that require too many new ingredients at once. Herbs and spices are one of the most expensive grocery store items. Try to plan new recipes around ingredients you already have, particularly if money is tight.

5. Schedule meals logically to use highly perishable ingredients early in the week. Also keep in mind which nights will be particularly busy and aim to have quick and easy meals for those nights.

6. Feed your freezer. It’s often just as easy to make a double batch of things like spaghetti sauce and chili and freeze them for the future.

7. Make reasonable rules about eating. You don’t want to micromanage your kid’s eating, but once they are old enough to serve themselves, they are old enough to learn limits and rules. If you don’t want to go to the store every day, make sure your children understand it’s not okay to waste or over-consume food. That said; make sure that you budget for reasonable amounts of healthy, inexpensive snacks.

8. If you’re counting on leftovers for lunches the next day, go ahead and put them in storage containers in the fridge right away. You don’t want to chance them going bad on the counter and if you have hearty eaters that eat until the food is gone, well, it might disappear and you’ll have to scrounge something else for lunch.

9. Learn to get in and out of the store quickly when you need to make a milk, produce and bread run in the middle of the week. Don’t let yourself be tempted to buy things you don’t need.

10. Make sure to make a list. The more often you go to the store, the more likely you are to buy things you don’t need.

11. Shop in your pantry. Base the week’s meals on what you already have. This is a great way to use new spices you bought for one recipe, too.

12. Consult the week’s grocery flyers before you go shopping. Base your meals on what is on sale. If you are unfamiliar with some of the items, look at it as an opportunity to try something new. It’s easy to find recipes for everything under the sun on the Internet these days.

Do you menu plan or do you wing it? What are your tips for planning your family’s meals?

Tracy O’Connor is the mother of 5 boys and a ghostwriter who also writes a personal humor blog.

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