Planning your meals week by week isn’t the easiest thing, by all means. After all, you’ve got to take individual tastes and dislikes into account, as well as intolerances and allergies, and then you’ve got to think whether the food is boring or not. Truly, it’s a lot to try and take into account!
However, it doesn’t have to be a stressful planning session. You can trim the fat here and there (metaphorically!), and make your weekly spreadsheet a lot easier to follow along with. Check out the tips below for help with that, especially if you’re getting close to just winging it every stressful evening!
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Make Your Weekly Meal Calendar
This is the best way to start. If you’ve already got a spreadsheet, chuck it out and make a new one! You need to make a real change to the meal planning around here, for your own sanity, and that means drawing up a fresh calendar.
Break it down into a monthly rotation. Define it by what you’ll cook every week one, then two, and so on and so forth. This helps keep costs down and ensures there are no surprises to deal with at dinner time!
Buy Frozen Ingredients
Frozen ingredients are always better, even when you swear by the fresh stuff. Why? Because they last longer! In doing so, they give you enough time to come up with different meal plans for the week ahead. You can go out and buy the basics, chuck it all in the freezer, and then take your time in trying out different dishes to serve.
Freezing also helps to lock in all those nutrients; when you freeze something fresh, it stays fresh, and that means nothing is lost before you throw it in a pan to cook. Of course, if you keep things in the freezer for over a year at a time, your ingredients will get frost bitten. But if you take it out to use before then, you’ll still have fresh meats and veggies to rely on.
Go on a Weekly Hunt for Recipes
If you’re bringing new recipes into the home on a weekly basis, you’ll always have something new to try. That can make spending hours cooking in the kitchen much more entertaining. And not only that, but it ensures the diners at your table never get bored either. There’s nothing worse than a fussy toddler who refuses to eat their broccoli for the 5th night in a row!
So get online and look into family friendly, easy recipes you won’t have to put much effort into. For example, a good plate of crispy baked chicken wings would be a lovely dish to lay on the table, alongside some roasted peppers or pepper bowls filled with some creamy deliciousness. A bit of variety keeps dinnertime something to look forward to, so get doing your research!
Planning your meals on a weekly basis is the easy way ahead. Try it out with your family.
This is a contributed post.
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