I thought I would take this Tuesday to do something a little different than the recipes that I usually post. I thought I’d share with you how I went from meal planning weekly to monthly.
Ever since Hubs and I were in grad school, we’ve done weekly meal plans. We’d always come up with meals we wanted to eat for the week, and we tried to stick to what was on sale. Even though we were pre-planning our meals and lists, it still seemed like we were spending a ton of money each week for food for our, at the time, family of 3. Not all of the food was used, and we would spend more money to replace the food that had gone bad.
I read on tips for how to save money on our grocery bill, and among the top five strategies mentioned were to create a monthly meal plan. I have to admit, making a meal plan for an entire month seemed like this HUGE daunting task, especially since we were having a hard time coming up with varied meals to make it through 7 days! How would we come up with over 4 times that?
Over the years, I just got bored with planning meals each week. It seemed like every other week we were going back to the same old meals, and we were lacking a lot of variety. Fall came, and we were eating roast chicken dinners and chicken noodle soup left and right, to the point that I was so sick of roast anything by the time Christmas came around. It can make for a very long winter. We would also fall back to our weekly favorites of spaghetti, tacos and French toast.
When we moved to our current house at the beginning of 2014, we were 30 minutes from town. That’s 30 minutes from a grocery store. I can’t just stop by and pick up something that we needed for dinner that night. Any time we had to go to town it better be worth my time and fuel, so I started stretching out our weekly meal plans.
I started very simply at first. I would plan a few extra meals for the week based on the items that we had on hand. It was enough, that we could get through until the next time we had to go to town. Eventually those few extra meals turned into an additional week, and before you knew it, I was planning a month’s worth of meals at a time.
And it honestly wasn’t as hard as I had thought a few years before. The best part? I’ve been able to reduce our grocery bill even further, without clipping coupons or basing our meals off the sales ads!
When I plan out our monthly meals, I don’t always follow it to a “T”. Sometimes I’ll write down potato soup and what winds up being made is sausage potato soup if I have items for that on hand instead. Sometimes every intention of a baked lasagna turns out to be a skillet lasagna instead.
But what my monthly meal plan does is give me a guide for our meals for the month, and a guide for me to shop by.
And to make it even better, we’re not eating the same meals week in and week out!
Here’s the steps I take when I create our monthly meal plan:
1 – Print out a monthly calendar and your recipes.
Before I start filling in the month, I consult my on-the-go planner note any important events going on for the month. Doctor appointments, field trips, concerts, piano lessons…. basically any and all extracurricular activities. I even include days the district will be closed and the boys are home. I do use color coding for a fast reference while looking at our meal plan calendar.
2 – Use a daily theme.
Taco Tuesday anyone? Breakfast, Italian, etc. There’s a reason having a theme works; it takes some of the stress off the planning! Besides themed days, I try to have a larger meal like roast chicken or roast beef on the weekends, and a second meal from that throughout the week. If the roast gave me more than what I need for meals for the remainder of the week, I freeze the rest to be used later in the month, or in the next month.
3 – Plan for a few leftover meals.
This is great to use up some of the food that is still sitting in your fridge. I was planning one each week, but I found that my kids started eating more, we wound up with less leftovers. Leftovers are my favorite night, aside from not having to cook. It’s where you can get creative with what’s left in the fridge. I’ve used leftover taco meat on top of leftover baked potatoes, and it was surprisingly delicious {I’m not a huge taco fan, so for me, this was a pretty big step}. Lesson is, don’t be afraid to experiment.
4 – Include a few quick & easy meals.
This works great during soccer season. Those nights we’re out the door no sooner than we got in, or even nights where you’re not exactly in the cooking mood. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just something that’s really simple to throw together and call a meal. If you’re the kind that likes slow cooker meals, these kind of nights work perfectly for that. Bonus points if you remember to start the meal before 4pm the night of.
5 – Don’t forget to try some new recipes.
I like trying a new recipe at least every week, or even a new way of making an old favorite. You never know what recipe you may stumble upon that becomes the new family favorite!
Once you get the month filled in with your meals, you’re done! You’ve now got a list of meals you can reference throughout the month for meal prep as well as your shopping lists.
As I go through the month, I highlight or cross off the meals I’ve already made for the month. It makes it really easy for everyone to see what’s left to make for the month. Then when it’s time to go shopping, I look at the meals that are left for the month, pick ones that have some common ingredients, and make my weekly shopping list based off that. I also mark the meals for the upcoming week with either dots or dashes, for easier reference when it’s time to start thinking about dinner for the night.
As you can tell, I don’t make the meal I wrote down for the a specific day on that exact day. I simply use it as a guide for the meals that I will shop for and cook this month. It makes dinner time very easy and flexible!
Need some ideas to get you started on monthly meal planning? At the beginning of each month, I post what our meal plan will be. You can check them out here!
So tell me, do you use a monthly or a weekly meal planning method? What are some themed nights you use when you’re making your meal plans?
I used to make a weekly plan but didn’t really sit down every week to plan it so I stopped doing it… Then I started a notebook where I just wrote down every night what I made and looked back when I had no idea what to make. That was not bad but not really planning! I will try your monthly planning combined with my notebook to fill it with ideas. Thank you so much!
Keeping a notebook is a really good idea! I do keep some of our meal plans to look back on for new ideas when I feel like I’m stuck in a rut. During spring and fall, I use past meal plans as a guideline to see if soups are still acceptable. I could eat them year round, but the rest of the family wouldn’t agree.