A quick way to make meal planning easier
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I’ve posted before on the benefits of meal planning and I hope that you’ve found the value in it. Here’s a simple, quick tool to help the process along: a list of your family’s favorite meals. Yeah, it’s kind of obvious and I felt silly for not coming up with it earlier, but a comprehensive list of favorites can really take the pressure off.
You don’t have to agonize over what to make, where to find a good new recipe (and where to find the time to find it!), and what to do with the leftovers when the family isn’t wild about it. Sure, it’s fun to try new things from time to time, but most families would rather stick with maybe fifteen or twenty “tried-and-true” favorites than constantly be trying “experiments.”
It’s super easy to implement this tip. Just take a piece of notebook paper (or a blank file in your word processor) and start writing down the family’s most requested meals. If you are stuck, go ask your spouse and the kids. My husband was more than glad to register his vote for “normal things” (his words) like spaghetti and tuna sandwiches.
Then just put the list somewhere you can see it when you’re meal planning and also easily add to it. For me, that’s right here. I figure if I try one new dinner meal in a week and pull the rest from the list, that will keep the family happy and still let me experiment. My list is still evolving, and will be for some time, but hopefully you can use this advice to save time as well as money.
Love your philosophy on meal planning, it is always so much easier when you prepare what you know your family will eat.