![]() ![]() To create a food inventory, you will go through your kitchen cupboards, fridge, freezer, pantry, and anywhere else you store food. Making a food inventory can solve this problem. Because each item in your home was purchased to use and when we don’t it ends up wasted. While this step is by far the longest and most time-consuming, it is also the critical step to saving money and time. What is in your pantry? Fridge? Freezer? Cupboards? I’m guessing without looking you can list off 5-10 things, but what about blueberries? Oil? And how long has it been there? And if you are anything like me, you have no idea what spices and baking ingredients you have on hand. The first step in meal planning is to start with what you already have in the house. Instead of panicking about what to make, you can just pick something from your list and go. With a meal plan, you remove some of those decisions. You make decisions from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall into bed. You can shop around sales, and you won’t be buying food only for it to sit in your cupboards to go to waste. No more grabbing take-out on the way home than feeling guilty about the money you spent and the fact it is not the healthiest food out there. No more buying dill only to find out you had three bottles unopened at home. You know what to make when you get home because you have a plan. You know what to buy when you go grocery shopping because you have a list. Meal planning, in the end, saves you time. If you are looking for a system that you can stick with for the long haul, then keep reading. You technically can do this IF you want to blow a bunch of money and only want a short-term solution. It is easy to hop on Pinterest grab 5-7 recipes that look pretty, write the names on a meal planning page or app, and hit the stores. The problem is caving to the temptation to skip the first two steps and go right to step 3. Create an inventory of what you have on hand.Here are the three steps to simple meal planning: I meal plan each week in about 15 minutes because I’ve done the hard work. This three-step system allows me to meal plan each week in 15 minutes FLAT! It is not complicated, but like any reliable system, it does require a bit of an upfront effort to make it work. ![]() I’m so excited to share with you the system I’ve been using for over ten years now, it’s perfect for creating a “busy mom meal plan”. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, never mind what is at the bottom of my freezer. I could feel my stress level rising as she talked. I chatted with one mom who shares how she does her “no plan meal planning.” She does it all from memory. ![]() Then there are those that meal plan without a plan. Then I found the right plan and it changed my life. Never Say Never: I always avoided freezer meal plans because they seemed like too much work. Too many dishes at once for me, but if that is your thing, I say go for it! Still, many of them do seem to be overly complicated with color-coding systems, daily themes, and even plans where you cook everything for an entire month at once. There are a ton of how-to’s around the internet. Different Types Of Meal Planning For Busy Moms I quickly realized that if a planner helped me manage my hectic life, then a meal plannerwas going to be my answer to the dinner time chaos. I’d shoot a text off to my husband asking him to pick something up on the way home. Like many of you, there were days I dreaded walking in the door after work, especially if I realized I had not taken anything out of the freezer. Now that I am a working mom, I don’t have the time or the energy to battle with trying to make dinner appear out of thin air. Years ago in our house, my answer was “ummmmm,” and I got pretty darn good at pulling things out of the fridge on short notice when I was a stay-at-home mom. How many times have you heard “what’s for dinner?” and your answer was, “I don’t know.”? Simple Meal Planning To Answer “What’s For Dinner?”
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