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Meal Planning for my family has really become one of my favorite things that I do to keep my family organized and keep our life less chaotic. It has allowed us to have fewer frustrated “what do you want to eat tonight” conversations. We have also been able to stay within or lower our grocery budget with fewer “just throw it in the cart” opportunities. But this did not come overnight - the joy of meal planning has developed over months and years of trying things out and developing a system that works best for my family.

I love meal planning so much that I want to share some of my tips with you all and help you develop your own system for meal planning, budgeting, and finding inspiration for new meals! When I polled my followers, one of the main pain points that I heard from everyone was the lack of ideas for meals or inspiration in what to make each week. So along with my meal planning tips, I am also going to share an ongoing list of weekly meal ideas throughout this entire year!

My Best Meal Planning Tips

Are you ready to take your Meal Planning skills to the next level! Follow my Top 3 best meal planning tips and I promise you will find that meal planning becomes almost second nature and less overwhelming the longer that you do it! Let’s dive in!

Tip #1: Create a system to organize your recipes and meal ideas.

I hear this all the time when I talk about meal planning - one of the biggest pain points in planning and preparing meals is a lack of inspiration in what to make! One of the first steps in conquering meal planning on a routine basis is to have a great system for keeping track of your favorite meals or new recipes that you want to try.

As much as I appreciate and value paper products, sometimes it can get so overwhelming to remember what recipe book I need to reference or remember to print everything out to keep track of it in a recipe box. One of the things that has helped me the most in creating a consistent routine with meal planning is creating and utilizing a digital recipe box! While you could use a notes app or ongoing document, one of my favorite tools for a digital recipe box is the Trello app!

Why Trello is the Perfect Digital Recipe Box

You can customize a digital recipe box to fit your specific needs! Create main categories and labels that are appropriate for your family and lifestyle of cooking and eating. With Trello, you can customize and organize your lists, cards, and labels for whatever you would like - healthy meals, low-carb, by main protein, camping meals, etc. The sky is the limit!

You can add as many notes and details to your recipes as you want! You can link directly to a recipe that you found online, add a photo from the original recipe or an image that you took when you made the meal, add notes for things that you wanted to do different, or even copy and paste the recipe directly into the card on Trello so that you no longer have to sift through all of the ads or 20-page back-story about the blogger. (Ha!)

It’s searchable! Oh my, this is one of the BEST features for me. How many times have you found yourself wanting a quick reference to something but can’t remember where it is? It is so SO easy to use the search feature in Trello and type in “chicken soup” or “rosemary” and it will filter and show you all cards that have that information.

If you want to dig even deeper into using Trello for meal planning and as a digital recipe box, make sure to visit my Using Trello for Meal Planning blog post!

Tip #2: Create a Monthly Meal Plan to give you a big picture of your upcoming calendar and meal ideas

This tip often sounds overwhelming to people when I suggest it, but it is seriously a GAME CHANGER when it comes to effective meal planning! Looking at the “big picture” for meal planning allows you not only to see your family calendar and the way your family plans and events can affect your meal planning, but it also provides an opportunity to evaluate your grocery budget and plan and prepare for buying in bulk whenever possible.

Planning your meals for a month at a time is actually way easy and less overwhelming than it sounds. I like to sit down with my family calendar, plus my digital recipe box (and often look for new inspiration with Pinterest and Google). I do a combination of digital planning and writing things out on physical paper. For my monthly meal planning, I pretty much stick to just using Trello to track it all out, but there are also some great monthly paper planners that would be great for writing out your big picture meal plan by the month!

When planning for the month, I like to alternate my main protein so that we have some variety throughout the week, while also being conscious of being able to re-use some proteins in other meals. We like to pick meals that can provide leftovers for lunches throughout the week or that can be an easy dinner on a night that we don’t want to cook (like the nights that my husband works late and needs to take dinner with him to the office).

Make sure that you leave some nights open without a recipe! You want to allow for some flexibility throughout your week without over-buying or over-planning. For my family, we often visit my in-laws for dinner on Monday nights and use leftovers for Wednesday when my husband works late, and while I like to have some larger or fancier meals on the weekend, we also really like to keep it super simple on Sunday nights by ordering some pizza or takeout. Depending on your family dynamics and routine, shoot to have meal ideas planned for 4-5 nights of the week.

It’s also really important that you don’t worry about the details when you are planning for the month! You will be able to focus on the details later when you do your Weekly Meal Plans. When planning for the month, the main goal is the inspiration and getting a good feel for your overall routine and needs for meals that month!

Tip #3: Create a Weekly Meal Plan and focus on the specifics and details from your monthly plan

Your Weekly Meal Planning is where you will focus on all of the details! Pick a day to work on your Weekly Meal Plan every week. If your goal is to become more consistent and less overwhelmed with meal planning, you will want to build this into your schedule on a regular basis and make this a habit that is not hard to remember. For my family, I like to do my Weekly Meal Planning on a Saturday for consistency, but sometimes it lands on a Sunday instead. We consider Monday to be the start of a new week in our home, so I am always shooting to prepare for our meals prior to Monday as much as possible.

Once you sit down to look over your Weekly Meal Plan, take your Monthly Meal Plan and review the meals that you already picked out for that week. Now it’s time to do a brief evaluation - did your schedule change, do you want to change any of the meals that you already picked out, or perhaps you have leftover ingredients from a meal that you didn’t make the previous week? Check over each of the recipes (or your inspiration for the meal ideas) and build out your grocery list. I like to look at the list of ingredients and usually have my husband check the fridge, freezer, and pantry while I list off the ingredients and anything that we don’t have and need to buy, I will write down on my grocery list right away!

Again, I really like to do a combination of digital planning + writing things out on paper. I keep track of my entire meal plan digitally with Trello, but I also like to write out the weekly meal plan and grocery list on a specific weekly meal planning notepad and hang it on my fridge for quick visual reference.

When it comes to grocery shopping, make a plan for when you will get those groceries before the week starts. Do you like to do your shopping on Saturday morning? Is there another day of the week that is a better fit for your family? Perhaps you want to plan your weekly meal planning around your ideal shopping times. For our family, we usually do our grocery shopping over the weekend. I love building out my grocery list through our local grocery store app and then place an order for pickup. Sometimes we take the time to go shopping in person, but we find that when we can order ahead for pickup, we are less likely to add in extra items, which helps us to keep our grocery budget much lower. (Always a win!)

And of course, there are times throughout our week that I didn’t plan perfectly and find a last-minute grocery need and for those times, we really love having Instacart for smaller grocery needs! As a busy mom, it’s not always easy to run out and get groceries quickly or last-minute and Instacart feels like having a personal shopper in my back pocket. Prices on Instacart tend to be a little bit more expensive, so I certainly don’t do my large grocery hauls with Instacart. But paying a premium price to have someone else do some last-minute shopping for me when I can’t get out of the house easily is completely worth it to me! If you haven’t tried it yet, I would highly recommend giving Instacart a try!