Meal Planning That Works

I’ve always been a meal planner… Okay well, once we had a couple kids, I became a meal planner out of necessity. I remember my mom making a weekly grocery list. Sometimes in the summer, she made my brother and I be in charge of a dinner menu to teach us life skills. Thanks, Ma! Ha!

Over the past several months, I’ve tried various freezer plans & purchased monthly menus with color coded shopping lists.

I began more intentionally experimenting with meal planning systems with the following goals:

• Save money on groceries!! We were spending $2400 a month on household items & groceries and I was TIRED OF IT. (We’ve tracked spending with YNAB for 8+ years so I know EXACTLY what we spend.)
• Still eat healthy – meat, veggies, whole foods, etc.
• Minimize dinner chaos – I homeschool our 4 older kids, and then we had a surprise adoption of a toddler who was in our life. After being home all day, I just was tired of dinner prep hour feeling overwhelming. I needed simple.

I finally landed on what is WORKING SO WELL for our family… I keep telling people my new system as if I struck gold (they’re probably sick of hearing about it), but now our grocery budget is down to $1600 (that’s $800 less).

My dinner stress level is 10% instead of 95% and I’ve even had capacity to make some healthier swaps! (Like homemade bread instead of store bought.) And I spend less time in the kitchen.

I don’t know about you but that all feels like striking gold to me.

So without further ado, here’s what is working for me.

Simple + Tasty + Money Saving Meal Plan

On THURSDAY, I meal plan for Saturday to Saturday and make 2 grocery lists. One for our local Kroger store pickup and one for Costco. We live close to both of these stores. I choose 4 dinners that I can make ahead of time and DOUBLE. So I make sure to buy ingredients for 2x the servings we need.

Then on FRIDAY, in the morning, I do a Kroger pickup after the gym. It’s right on the way, otherwise I’d probably have them delivered for convenience. Friday late afternoon, I do a quick Costco run and pick up Costco pizza for dinner that night.

SATURDAY OR SUNDAY – I prep the main dish for 4 meals at once. But I double them!! Doubling is the key. I put the meals for the week in the fridge & the rest in the freezer. Once the freezer has at least 8-10 meals in it, I stop meal prepping on the weekends and just enjoy a couple weeks of dinners out of the freezer. That way the freezer never gets overwhelmingly full. But the batch prepping is what saves TONS of time and money.

Seriously, I’m so happy about week after week!!! I’ve been doing this for a couple months now.

A Few Other Meal Planning Tips

Throughout the week – add items to the list on the fridge that I need to get at next week’s grocery run. I try not to do mid-week runs. One thing that’s helped is moving my grocery pickup day to Friday. This way I can grab things for events that pop up!

I used to meal plan Monday and inevitably, something would come up during the week or for the following weekend. (i.e. need to bring drinks for sports game, have friends over, brings something to a kid activity the following week, etc.)

For some reason, getting groceries on Friday seems to work better for our planning. If you’re constantly running to the store during the week, consider changing your pickup day and seeing if that helps!

Household products – If they don’t come from Costco, I do a Target or Amazon delivery once every so often.

After trying several different systems and tweaks over the past few months, I’m SO happy with how this is flowing. I’m testing lots of easy prep recipes on my family and will put out a meal prep cookbook when I have a month’s worth.

How to get started

• Recipe binder!! I have all my go to recipes by category in a 2″ binder (from Target).
• Stick to simple meals at first – marinated meat, ground beef for tacos, etc.
• Prep the main dish ahead (don’t forget to double & freeze) & rotate through some simple whole food sides such as roasted baby potatoes, air fried sweet potatoes, sweet potato french fries, rice, rice pilaf, and occasional pasta.
• Grab 1-2 veggies for the week and chop them on weeknight number one instead of dinner prep. Then you can roast or sauteé those each night.
• Eventually, you’ll see a lot of freed up time & money. That’s when you can start making a homemade loaf of bread each week or swapping out a few easy snacks. I never in a million years thought I’d be making our own granola bars. LOL but homemade is all so easy, cheap, and healthy once you have dinner knocked out. Plus my kids like to cook so I rope them into helping as well!

What questions do you have!? Come find me on instagram @mrsreneecook and we can chat about it!

xoxo & happy meal planning.