Easy Meal Planning Tips for Busy Families

These easy meal planning tips for busy families will help you craft a quick and easy to follow meal plan that YOUR own family will love. 

Why should we meal plan? 

Why should we learn how to meal plan for ourselves?

There are a great plenty of meal planning services that will give you a fresh meal plan every week and send you a grocery list and voila! It’s all done!

This isn’t always the best approach, although it would save you a bit of time.

If you are a busy family with picky eaters in the family (usually in the form of adorable youngsters), they’re not going to enjoy a brand new meal every night.

They’re going to resist these attempts and everyone is going to end up frustrated. 

Not only will pre formatted meal plans cause distress for the picky eaters in the family, it will also cost you more when you have a grocery list a mile long of ingredients you don’t typically keep on hand. 

It is so important for us to learn how to do our own meal plans and good news… you CAN do it!

Step 1: Start by sketching out your schedule. 

Before you begin your weekly meal plan (or monthly), start by filling in your family members’ schedules.

This is the best way to start, so you don’t accidentally schedule a time intensive meal on a day when you won’t get home until late. This step is going to take a lot of the brain work out of the latter steps.

Plan the bulk of your cooking and/or meal prep on days when it works best for you to accomplish this.

Plan leftovers for nights when you have less time to pull together a meal. Or you can plan to quickly revamp leftovers from a rotisserie chicken into some quesadillas!

Just be aware of the time you will have each night to get supper put on the table.

Step 2: Have a running list of family favorites.

Keeping a list of family favorite meals will save you so much time once you start plugging in meals. Let these be meals that the whole family enjoys.

If you have a collection of recipes “to try”, that’s great. But be sure those recipes are not kept together with the family favorite recipes or you will die of decision fatigue.

Keep only the “best of the best” family favorites in a list somewhere for you to refer to. 

It’s also super helpful to keep a list of meals that are super “easy recipes”. Making home-cooked meals every night is going to be harder some days, and it will be so nice for you to have a quick reference for some fast dinners for busy nights. 

For those of us who love trying new recipes, and want to keep introducing healthy meals to our children, try to plan those “new” meals in between family favorite meals.

This will help the picky eaters to have an open mind.

*A quick note on feeding picky eaters and adventurous eaters alike.

Try to find ways to deconstruct certain meals to let the smaller children enjoy a bit of the meal.

For instance: Our younger children don’t like tacos. But when we have taco Tuesday, they get so excited because I make a side of rice and corn for them to enjoy.

We keep all the ingredients separate and everyone can choose to add what they like. Daddy gets his spicy fix while the younger kids enjoy some rice. It’s a win/win/win!

Step 3: Keep a record.

A few years ago we had a group meeting on “meal planning”. I had already been meal planning for years and figured I had a good system and probably wouldn’t learn anything new.

Boy, was I wrong!

Keeping a long-time record of the meal plans you make will be a huge blessing to your future self. Coming up with a new meal plan every week (or month) feels like a lot of work sometimes, and this is one way to “save” that work to make your life easier in the future.

I live in an area that has very distinct seasons. Our summers are blazing hot and our winters are frequently sub-zero temps. We eat very differently from one season to the next!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been glad to look back at last year’s July meal plan and see meals I may have forgotten about, or something that’s only in season in the summer. After doing this for some time, it’s a great way to help yourself make less decisions.

See what a difference it makes!

Step 4: Actually create your meal plan!

Notice how it took 4 steps to actually get to the menu plan? Now it will be much easier since you’ve done your ground work.

Start your meal plan by FIRST taking into account what you already have.

Dig through the fridge, freezer and pantry and get some inspiration from your own little stock of ingredients before heading to your favorite recipe book.

Starting with your ingredients you already have will help keep the grocery list much more manageable. This will help create much less food waste. Groceries are expensive, let’s use them all up wisely! 

To make things go even more quick and easy, you can choose a theme for each day of the week. This could be meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, slow cooker Wednesday, etc… 

If your family’s schedule is much more sporadic and doesn’t really lend itself to regular weekly meal ideas, then know you’re in good company! This whole process can be done anew every week. 

*When you’re truly in a very busy season, decide which items your family all enjoys and simply stick with those.

For instance, if I know we are about to enter a really busy season, I may choose to not experiment with any Thai food for a while.

Those meals (delicious as they are) usually require ingredients I don’t typically keep on hand and would be a hassle to acquire all these things for a weekly meal.

Sticking to the items we commonly keep stocked will save our sanity. This is also a wonderful relief to give yourself grace not to insert new recipes when we just need to get a delicious meal on the dinner table today. 

Step 5: Stick to your plan!

It can be so very tempting to veer from your plan. Maybe we get to “meatless Monday” and we’re craving a burger!

Maybe you have family members who try to change the supper plan that you’ve carefully crafted and grocery shopped for.

If this is a struggle in your home, then it might be helpful to keep the weekly meal plan somewhere everyone will see it.

That way, everyone will have all week to get on board with Mama’s plan!

Trust yourself and your plan and execute it accordingly.

There will come days when you don’t feel well and you will need to have grace for yourself. There will be days when life goes off the rails and you end up ordering pizza. Don’t stress! 

But these days will be our exception, not our usual. 

Family dinners are so important, and our families deserve nutritious meals. 

AND you deserve to have your time and efforts honored by sticking to your carefully planned family meal plan. 

​Meal planning matters!

Learning to create a family meal plan doesn’t have to take a lot of time.

Busy moms and dads can plan out a wonderful week of family meals for the family to gather around.

It can be quick meals or a simple meal of “snacky items”, but as long as you’re being intentional you will know what’s for supper every single night.

God bless you!