admin I’ve been meal planning for 10 years and I’ve simplified my system into a well-oiled machine!
I’m going to share my process below, but the truth is, no matter how simple or organized it is, it takes a lot of time. Anything worth doing does, right?!
The good news is I’ve already done it for us so if you want to put your meal planning on autopilot and not have to think about it, consider this my personal invitation for you to join the waiting list for the D+T Member’s Lounge where I’ve done it all for you! All you have to do is execute it.
Meal planning for the whole month in a way that uses ingredients cohesively throughout the weeks, plus creating the grocery list, sorted by store aisles and indicating which store each ingredient should come from (2 stores max), takes a couple of hours, at least.
When I first got started with meal planning, I had a process that looked something like this:
- Scroll through Pinterest or cookbooks and choose 7 meals that look good and I want to cook each week. (For the whole month that’s 28 recipes.)
- Write down those meals on a cute menu board on the fridge so everyone knows what’s for dinner.
- Next is grocery shopping. I have a general idea of what I need but going through and writing the ingredients to 28 recipes is crazy. And crazy expensive.
- Inevitably I forget something but oh well, I’ll go to the store again next week. **Puts all the groceries away.
- Dinner time comes, I open the newly stocked fridge, and happily cook the first of many delicious recipes I have planned for this week.
- Flash to the next week and the produce is going bad, I’ve gotten fast food 3 times this week and am regretting all of those fancy Pinterest recipes I chose that require an hour in the kitchen every night. I have a kitchen stocked with food but no real idea what to do with it all because spending an hour or more cooking dinner every night is not realistic.
Does this sound like you? I quickly realized how inefficient it was and I flipped that model on its head. Now I have a 5 step process to meal planning that looks like this:
- Take inventory of everything I have in the kitchen already. Start with the fridge because that’s the stuff that will go bad first. Then the freezer and finally the pantry.
- Look at that list and begin matching ingredients that could make meals.
- On my meal planning calendar, plugin those meals I already have on hand, plus write in any events I have scheduled that I won’t need to cook. Now cross off one night a week for Leftover Night.
- NOW I can choose extra meals I’ll want to cook and plug those into the empty days. For each month choose 2 meats and 3 veggies to create meals using those same ingredients in very different ways. This allows me to shop in bulk for the whole month and keep my grocery budget low!
- I then use my meal plan to make a shopping list of everything I’ll need for the month. I indicate the ingredients I’m going to get at Target (my cheapest grocery store) vs. Costco and I go a step further and organize my list by grocery aisle so I can save myself even more time while shopping and never forget anything!
In the D+T Member’s Lounge we take it a step further and meal prep the majority of our meals for the month. I take you step by step through Prep Day to maximize your time in the kitchen so no time is wasted.
If this seems like a lot of work….you’re right, it is. But it’s so worth it and that’s why I’ve done all the thinking and planning for both of us!
I’m talking a full month of meals planned every month sent to your inbox, detailed shopping lists organized by grocery aisle and different stores, kitchen inventory worksheet, Prep Day Game Plan that gives step by step directions for preparing your meals for the whole month, freezing and food storage instructions, Easy Peasy Swaps Guide and so much more inside the exclusive D+T Members Lounge.
Get on the waiting list to be the first to know when it launches!
Happy Meal Planning!
