4 Brilliant Meal Planning Tips for Busy Families

On average, an American household spends just under $5,000 on groceries a year. This is a good chunk of change, so you want to get the most out of the food you’re buying.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of food waste, and households end up dumping a lot of rotten groceries. But if you’re always busy, it can be tough to prep and cook every single ingredient in the fridge.

Need some help making the most of your groceries? Then keep reading for 4 meal planning tips for busy families!

1. Have Daily Themes

If you’re always struggling to think of what to make each day, then make it easier on yourself by having daily themes. For example, some popular ones are Meatless Mondays and Taco Tuesdays!

With themes, you can narrow down your meal choices, but without limiting yourself so much that you get bored every week. It’ll also make it easier when buying your groceries. Click here if you want some quality meat for the fridge!

2. Don’t Go Too Fancy

Foodies love to go fancy, but it’s not practical. This is especially true if you’ve got a large family to feed!

It’s best if you stick to simple meals and save the fancy stuff for when you treat everyone to a meal out. Aim to have a protein, vegetable, and starch for every meal, and that should be good enough.

3. Always Make Leftovers

It’s healthy to eat at home, and not to mention, it’s cheaper too. But while striving to cook 3 meals a day, 7 days a week is noble, it’s not very feasible.

What you should do instead is always make leftovers. Since you’re already cooking, throw in extra ingredients; make double the batch if you can. That way, you can reduce actual cooking days to 4 or 5.

4. Meal Prep on One or Two Night

One of the best meal planning tips is to prep all your food in one night (or two if you need to spread it out). If you have the time and manpower to do this, it’ll be easy to dish out healthy meals to everyone without much effort.

Once you’ve come up with your weekly meal plan, you can hunker down for a few hours and hammer out the meals for the week. Put them in fridge or freezer-safe containers, then store them away. Come mealtime, you just have to thaw and/or microwave the meal and it’s good to go!

Use These Meal Planning Tips to Save Time and Money

If you’ve wanted your family to eat healthier and to make good use of the groceries you buy, then we hope this article’s helped you with meal planning for the family. It can be useful to come up with daily themes, cook leftovers, or meal prep in one or two goes. So put all your noggins together and set a plan that’ll work to keep your family happy and healthy!

To find more hacks like these meal planning tips, read the rest of our blog page.