Meals planning was something I struggled a lot with. In fact, isn’t it something we all struggle with? When you are a family with strong individual preferences of eating veg and non-veg or have some health goals to achieve, planning the meal gets even more difficult.
Planning Meals for a week
Why do I plan our meals
Planning our meals give us many advantages out of which the most important one is making sure that we are getting the right nutrition everyday. Last minute meal preps often might be good to taste but may be low on nutrition.
Planning meals in advance help me decide on the grocery and vegetables in advance. This way I can order my requirements online and get the delivered on time. Saving my precious time.
Since we know what all we need and we order online there is no chance of extra shopping and hence we even save on bucks J Thus, meal planning has been economical for us too
Planning meals prevent wastage of stuff we tend to buy thinking that we might need it during meal prep and which ultimately pasts the expiry date.
Planning your meal always helps specially if you want to achieve some health goal.
I am a sucker for plans and routines. Keeping my meals planned helps me a great deal in maintaining my stress levels and give me more time with my family.
How did I start planning meals
When I first thought of planning our meals, I started with listing out what all my family prefers having for breakfast, snacks and dinner. We never planned for lunch meals for weekdays as that happened in the school and office.
However, now during the COVID-19 lockdown we plan all the 3 main meals and 2 snack meals for the day.
Weekends usually are for experimental cooking and recipes which require more time. Hence those are listed separately .
Once I have the list of things we prefer having for each meal, it becomes very easy to fit them into a routine. This also helps in listing down the ingredients needed for the meals for the week.
Thankfully my daughters have not been picky eater and eat all the veggies, thus I am spared of the need of hiding vegetables in different recipes. We usually order vegetables through milk basket, Big basket Daily , Super Daily every 2-3 days and get fresh stock whenever we need.
One thing we used to do earlier and have gone back to in the Lockdown period is making the Magic Masala for my dal tadka and for the gravy items.
The magic Masala is my regular Tadka we make for the Dal and the gravy we make, I make them in bulk and refrigerate it. This has saved me lot of time and energy during the weekdays.
For my non-veg lover family members( my husband and my elder daughter), we get chicken, fish or mutton(rarely) on weekends and Sundays are Non-veg days for us usually.
Grocery stocking is done every 2 weeks for us. Since we have been ordering stuff online, we do it every two weeks.
How I plan our weekly meals
I usually sit with our magnetic planner board on Sunday evening and create a meal plan for a week. Yes, I do it for a week because I know I have close to no time or brain during the weekdays to decide on what to cook .
Usually the things we already have in our pantry, stocks are planned for first 2-3 days of the week. Rest of the days we plan and then list down what all ingredients need to be ordered.
During the lockdown days when the amount of household work is also on me, I do a lot of bulk cooking, like boiling extra dal, making the gravy for lunch during breakfast time. Usually, I aim to prepare breakfast and lunch in the morning hours so that I can work as usual during my work hours.
Planning meals for a few weeks gets you the hang of it and then you can implement your health goals to your meal plan and it will become really easy.
Planning our meals have been really game changer in terms of time management and productivity for me.
This is how things have worked for me. Hope the post helps you plan your meals for the week as well. If you want o get some meal plan idea do follow me on Instagram , I share my weekly meal plan every Sunday night.
Do you also plan your meals in advance? How do you usually plan your meals? Let me know in the comment section below
This post is written as part of the BlogchatterA2Z challenge.
Nice tips. Otherwise what to cook is more painstaking than actual cooking. Andvits goes on for every meal.
Yes, Meal planning helps a lot. I usually chop veggies like cabbage, beans, carrots, bell pepper and store them in freezer bags or containers, cook extra daal. If I have cut veggies then more than half of the time is saved. Sometimes I use leftover daal in next day’s parathas or using leftover rice in making burger Pattie. This help me in fixing quick meals and also minimizes the food stage.