How to Make a Family Meal Plan

We all know it’s much more likely to execute dinner and not be stressed last minute about what to cook if we have some sort of meal plan in place. This simple family meal plan can help take away the panic of hearing the words, “what’s for dinner tonight?!”

A weekly meal plan

The family meal plan I use is on a week-by-week basis, so those are the examples I give. But you could easily take these concepts and plan for less than a week or more than a week at a time depending on your preference!

Breakfast and lunch

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I personally do not meal plan breakfasts or lunch. What I do instead is keep everything we need for those meals so that it’s super easy and we have variety. Some of our breakfast staples include eggs, sausage, bacon, bagels, english muffins, cereal, yogurt, protein powder, & fruit.

For lunch we typically keep bread for sandwiches, deli meat, peanut butter and jelly, chicken nuggets, salami & cheese, etc. Sometimes I’ll make breakfast for lunch! It’s just me and the kids so I keep it low key, BUT if your whole family is home or you want something more official, you could certainly plan meals or even do dinner leftovers!

So for the rest of this article, I am mostly talking about planning dinner meals 🙂

Keep a list of your favorite meals

This first thing you can do to take the guesswork out of dinner is to make a list of all the meals your family loves. This could be as easy as writing a note in your phone. You could even have separate lists based on the seasons: meals you love in cool weather and meals you love warm weather. If you want to get super fancy, you could even categorize them! You could group them by the easiness of the recipe, the type of meal it is, what meat it requires, etc. It could help selecting your meals for your family meal plan an easier process!

See what food needs to be used up

Before choosing what meals to make for the week, it’s good to first look in your fridge and your pantry to see what needs to get used up. Not only does this eliminate waste, but it also will shorten your grocery list to use what you already have. Use this information to help choose which meals you will make!

Look ahead at your schedule

It’s important to look ahead at your week before you decide on meals. Do you need to take your kiddo to soccer practice on Tuesday? That is probably not the best day to cook an elaborate meal. Think crock pot meals on those busy nights, or leftovers! We personally cook every other night and have leftovers the following night. Sometimes we double recipes if we need to just so I don’t have to cook two nights in a row! What I do is plan my cook nights on evenings where we don’t have as much going on.

Write down what meals you will have each day

If you’re not a type A personality, you may have just tightened up a little, ha! I need you to know this doesn’t have to be set in stone, sealed with an oath lol! Your family meal plan can TOTALLY be flexible! But you have a plan in place. Monday through Sunday, you have written down what’s for dinner. I even put our little menu on the fridge where the kids can see it! Then, when I get asked the inevitable question “What’s for dinner?” we can quickly glance at the menu. If we have leftovers one night, I write that down. If we plan to eat out or do take out one night, I write that down too!

Make your grocery list for shopping day

Having a weekly meal plan works best if you have a day of the week that is your grocery shopping day (even if it’s a quick trip!) This really helps streamline things and makes planning so much easier to have this in routine. If you’re anything like me, if you wait til you feel like going to the store, you never will, haha! But if it’s part of your schedule, then you’ll just go.

Once you know what meals to make, you will need to write down what ingredients you need on your grocery list along with whatever else you need. Make sure and get things to have for breakfasts, lunch, and snacks. Usually, these are the things you buy over and over! I like to write my grocery list in order of the way I walk through the grocery store. I go through the produce section first, so I write those items at the top!

Morning planning & prepping

On any given day, it’s helpful to look at your menu in the morning and remind yourself what you’re cooking (or not cooking) that evening. Does any meat need to thaw from the freezer? What time does dinner need to be put in the crockpot? Do you need to feed your sourdough starter? Are there any vegetables that you want to chop ahead of time to make putting the meal together easier later on? These are all things to think about at the beginning of the day (or even the night before) so you don’t find yourself scrambling right before dinner time.

Sometimes a meal plan doesn’t happen

If we are realistic though, we know that sometimes meal planning is not always feasible. Maybe something unexpectedly came up, or you’re swamped before the week starts and it just didn’t happen. Often times when we go out of town, I don’t get a chance to make a meal plan or even make it to the grocery store. So what do you do??? Freezer meals & a stocked pantry is how we make it happen.

Have freezer meals ready to go

Do you know who is the queen of freezer meals? Becky from Acre Homestead. I get so inspired from watching her make freezer meals for her family! You can watch her freezer meals playlist HERE. I also love Trader Joe’s freezer meal options! If you can keep a few meals in the freezer, that will save you on those days where you don’t have a plan for dinner but you don’t want to spend money on take-out.

Keep your staples in bulk

When you don’t get around to meal planning or even to the grocery store, you can still have a stocked pantry and freezer. These are two places where you can store food and ingredients that you use often. If you have ingredients, you can make food! If one of your go-to meals is spaghetti, it makes sense to always have pasta, ingredients to make the sauce, and ground beef stored in the freezer.

It’s a good idea to have extra of everything… even if you have some extra meat in the freezer and a can of green beans, you’re good to go! If you know how to bake bread, keep flour on hand and you can always have a fresh loaf for sandwiches. The more you know how to cook from scratch, the more you can get away with just having ingredients on hand and always having something to eat.

My favorite places to get food in bulk is Costco and Azure Standard! I will shop at these places about once a month to replenish what I’m out of. Then when I make my weekly grocery list (I go to Trader Joe’s) I just have a small list to fill in the gaps.

To summarize, here are the main points of this weekly family meal plan!

• Keep a list of your family’s favorite meals
• See what food needs to be used up and look at your schedule before planning meals
• Write down what meals you’ll have each day of the week
• Make your grocery list & have a weekly grocery shopping day
• Meal prep & plan ahead as needed each morning
• Keep freezer meals and food in bulk for when you can’t plan ahead

Get your Weekly Meal Planning Menu

Print this out, plan your meals for the week, and put it on your fridge so the family can see! You can make this reusable by laminating it and using a dry erase marker! Get your Printable HERE

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Happy Meal Planning!