Meal Planning Ideas
Easy meal planning ideas can make deciding what to serve for dinner so much more simple.
You can easily save an hour a day or more when you know what's for dinner because you don't have to hum and haw and rummage around the kitchen, search for a last minute recipe only to find yourself driving to the store for missing ingredients.
And you'll save money because you can buy stuff on sale, avoid those impulse purchases at the checkout line and, with food in the fridge and freezer plus a plan to cook it you won't want to order take out.
Below you'll find an excerpt from my upcoming ebook on Meal Planning.
These six meal planning ideas will get you started down the road to eating better and having peaceful meals with your family.
Planned overs are leftovers that you planned to make. If you make double of a meal so your family can have it for dinner on night and for lunch the next day those are planned overs.
It's a great way to get healthy homemade lunches without a lot of work. Just portion out the servings for lunch at the same time you portion out dinner so no one is tempted to over-eat thinking there is plenty and then find out there isn't enough for lunch too.
Batch Cooking
Not into eating the same thing the next day? Batch Cooking means you make extra, just like planned-overs but you freeze it for later. You can make as many extras as you want, doubling, tripling or even quadrupling a recipe.
Double Dip
You can double dip and use planned overs and batch cooking together. Imagine cooking one nigh and having dinner tonight, lunch tomorrow and the same thing already assembled for a night next month.
In my house we do this with Sheppard's Pie. I'll make a 9x13 inch casserole dish of Sheppard's Pie which serves the two of us for dinner, lunch and usually a third meal. We'll make a second one to freeze and get four to six meals out of one night's cooking.
C.O.R.N.
Remember we talked about C.O.R.N. aka Clean Out the Refrigerator Night for cleaning up the night before garbage day. It's also good to do before your grocery shopping day if you can possibly schedule all three together.
Either way add C.O.R.N. to your meal plan at least one day a week, maybe even two if you have lots of leftovers. It gives you a day off and uses up all the extra food you've got before it goes bad.
Freezer Meals
When you know you won't have time to cook a meal from scratch consider reheating something from the freezer or using "Time Savers" from the freezer so you can still have a healthy, homemade dinner.
Freezer Stocking Days
Don't forget to plan on stocking your freezer too. Along with Batch Cooking you can plan to stock up your freezer with Time Savers, Budget Savers, or Smart Shopper Sessions. These terms are explained in my ebook, The Freezing Food Crash Course
If you found these meal planning ideas useful, want to keep up with the latest from Favorite Freezer Foods and get notified when the meal planning ebook is ready then join us on the Facebook Page or sign up for the ezine.
More pages to sink your teeth into:
Coconut Cookie RecipeGet Started Freezing Food
Chicken Meatballs
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