Weekly Menu Planning: Getting Started

Menu planning is a great way to reduce the time spent at the grocery store and keep the grocery bill on budget. Menu plans can be simple or be a bit more elaborate to accommodate special diets. Deciding how to start menu planning can be a bit daunting. Breaking weekly menus down into groups can help speed up the process, as well as keeping recipes and favorite meals organized in a binder for quick reference.

Menu in a Box, a membership site where all the work of menu planning is taken care of for you, is a great resource for menu planning — it does the work for you. If it saves you from eating out just once in a month, it pays for itself.

Create a Menu System

The first step is to create a menu system. This can be as easy as using a daily planner to write down the meals, creating a spreadsheet, or printing out premade menu planners from home organization websites. The simplest form of menu planning is to take pen to paper, write down the days of the week, break each day down into breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and include a grocery list on the back of the paper. Once the basic weekly menu planning system is organized, a more complex system that plans by the month, or even the year, can be organized and put into use.

Go Through the Pantry

One aspect of menu planning is to save money. By starting every weekly menu plan with a pantry inventory, a person can fill up quite a bit of their menu without having to buy anything. Flour, frozen fruit, peanut butter, jelly, eggs, bread, and milk are all common staples in many households. All of these items can make one or two breakfasts or lunches. Fruit with scrambled eggs and toast can be one breakfast, while peanut butter and jelly sandwiches work for a quick lunch. Homemade biscuits with fried eggs and fruit could be the next day’s breakfast. So every meal plan should start by creating meals from foods already on hand. (Source: Kiwi Mag)

Shop the Sale Ads

The next step to help save money and plan meals is to shop the sale ads. This means that menu planning may not always be feasible at the beginning of the week, since many stores put out sale ads on Thursday or Friday. Look for items that can provide more than one meal for the cheapest cost. If fryer chickens go on sale for .60 a pound, plan to use the chicken for more than one meal. Plan baked chicken for one dinner and chicken soup for another night. Or plan to cook and shred the chicken for a casserole one night, chicken tacos another night, and use the carcass to make broth for soup. Leftovers can be used for the lunch menu. This is also a good time to take an inventory of coupons for foods that would work well for side dishes or desserts.

(Source: Organized Home)

Use Favorite Recipes

If there are still meal spaces open during the week after pantry planning and sale ad planning, fill them in with favorite recipe foods. This is also the time to decide if the menu should include a new recipe. Including one new recipe a week, or even every other week, helps add variety to a menu that may include a lot of the same foods. Go through cookbooks or websites to find a new recipe that appeals to everyone. If possible, try to find a recipe that uses similar ingredients to the ones already being used for the week. If having tacos one night, try to find a recipe that uses up the leftover taco shells or hamburger meat.

Make a List and Plan for Changes

After creating the menu, write down all of the groceries needed to fulfill the meals planned for the week. If using up the last of a staple item, such as flour, milk, bread, or eggs, include it on the list. Double check the menu to make sure all of the items are on the grocery list.

The last thing to do is plan for changes. Weekly menus can change and should allow for the occasional unplanned event to happen. The family may end up going out to eat or get stuck late at a sporting event. Make sure the menu can handle changes. If soup was made and planned for the weekend but the family ate out, freeze the soup and add it to next week’s menu. Another idea is to plan a night for leftovers, which can easily be moved from one night to another.

While menu planning can seem like an overwhelming task at first, breaking it into chunks can help it seem less confusing. After organizing a weekly menu, don’t throw it away. File it in a folder, on a spreadsheet program, on an online database made for menu planning, or in a daily planner. After a couple of months, start recycling the menus when strapped for time or food ideas. Eventually, all of the weekly menus can be transferred to a monthly menu plan, saving even more time and money.

I print out several at a time and keep a month’s worth of finished menus on hand when planning a weekly menu. This way, dietary variety is more achievable; and favorite meals are easily remembered.

The colors make it easy to see at a glance what’s for any given meal throughout out the week.