meal planner template printable mini binder

#Meal planner template printable mini binder mac

It lets me know exactly how much of any given item I'm going to need for a year. If Aunt Sally drops by and wants to take us out to dinner, as long as she's paying, I don't have a problem with that.

#Meal planner template printable mini binder mac

Or if we don't feel like spaghetti, that's ok we can pick the mac & cheese with fish. If I ran out of time for the enchiladas one day, that's ok, we still have tacos. This gives me the flexibility that we needed. By the end of the week you only have one or two meals to pick from, but it gives lots of options early on in the week. Each day, pick one meal from that week's cards. Once the weeks were broken down I marked them with A, B, C and D so that one week doesn't fall into the other.ĥ. This is cooked early in the week so DH has leftovers for lunches.Ĥ. Also, one big meal (ones we usually have left overs) per week. And trying to keep perishable ingredients that don't freeze well all on one week (Enchiladas and tacos on the same week since they both use sour cream). Not repeating on one week (no grilled cheese 2 times a week). Each week gets 8 cards so there's even more built in flexibility. Even the small ones, like needing butter for grilled cheese or salt for mac&cheese.ģ. I wrote the ingredients for each meal on the back of it's card. I filled in these with our staple dinners and repeated favorite ones, like spaghetti a couple of times. That left us with 27 dinners that needed accounting for. And I decided that I may want to try 1 new meal a week. DH and I decided that we would eat out only 1 time for dinner each month. I decided that I would have my cards repeat every 4 weeks. I pick out a weeks worth of cards (they rotate, see below), from that I pick out each night's meals the day of. These are 3x5 cards that have every meal my family typically eats on them. And we will have left overs for lunches or in case a friend drops in. I go shopping every week and only hit up deals with coupons and the rare exception to get a few missing ingredients for dinners.įor example, this week I will feed my family of 3 humans, 1 dog and 1 cat for less than $30. Did I mention that it works? And it's easy to boot!įirst off, I am a coupon diva. How? Simply click here to return to 52 Week Home Organization Challenge Hall Of Fame.ĭebra has shared her system for planning meals, using menu cards, and I have to say it is a pretty awesome idea! Debra says:I started this system a little over a year ago and it's worked really REALLY well for my family. Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. You can share your methods in the Home Organization Hall of Fame here, and I'll feature the best here on the site. When you do, or if you already do meal planning in your own home, and want to share how you do it, I would love to see what you do. If the ideas you see below (scroll down to see them all) inspire you - and I hope they do - I urge you to take the Healthy Meal Planning Challenge yourself, which is part of the 52 Weeks to an Organized Home Challenge. There are lots of ways to plan for this daily task, cooking and eating, and none of them are right or wrong, it just depends what works best for you. It may not be quite that harsh when it comes to meal planning, but if you don't plan what you'll eat with your family each day you will either not eat as well as you could, or it will take you way too much time to prepare meals each day.

Well, the short answer is that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You may be wondering why its even important to plan meals.