Why Meal Planning Is Important For Your Budgeting
What Is Meal Planning?
Meal planning involves compiling a list of meals to be prepared every day during the week instead of trying to decide every time you want to cook. You will also be shopping for the ingredients in advance and having them ready for use during cooking time. There is prior planning and no meal is prepared without being on the plan, even if it’s takeaway or leftovers from the previous day.
Why You Should Plan Your Family Meals
1. Encourages Variety
Every family has their favourite ‘go-to’ recipes and you’ll find that you tend to eat the same things week in, week out. There’s nothing wrong with that and these meals can go on your planner because they’re easy and you know they’ll be eaten.
You can avoid repetitive serving of the same food which can be monotonous and unappetising to your family if eaten too often. Maybe one new recipe per week added to the planner, this will increase your repertoire and hopefully prevent boredom. It can help you diversify favourite dishes using new ingredients that will leave everyone looking forward to eating time.
2. Encourages Nutrition
Having an idea about what you are going to cook and the ingredients already to hand gives you time to concentrate on preparing delicious meals to enjoy with your family. Meal planning helps you stick to healthy eating based on the nutritional value of a diet instead of relying on food cravings.
3. Helps Serve Better Meals
Meal planning gives you the time to become creative with cooking recipes and helps to improve the quality of the food prepared for your family. You have adequate time to spice up your meals with side dishes including desserts and salads. Your family can also eat healthy meals even when you are away since they only have to follow the plan.
4. Being Conscious of the Needs of Every Member of the Family
Meal planning helps you focus on the foods preferred most by your family thus avoid making meal times boring by preparing meals that have a low appeal to them. Additionally, meal planning promotes inclusivity where some members of your family do not eat some types of foods. It is essential to have everyone’s needs being considered when preparing family meals and should save disagreements.
Benefits of Meal Planning
1. Saves Money
When you have a meal plan, you know the ingredients to buy in the supermarket and can shop for them in large amounts. You can save by buying in bulk and being prepared with a shopping list and reduce the number of times you have to pop to the shops because you have nothing in for tea. This also helps avoid impulse buying on other items that you don’t need.
2. Helps Avoid Waste
Meal planning helps to avoid wastage on uncooked and cooked food. You avoid having unused ingredients expiring on your shelves and throwing away cooked food which was left over or failed to impress your family members. Although if there are leftovers then make a point of freezing them or trying to use them the next day. I’m not saying scrape the plates if people have failed to finish their meal but if after dishing up there’s a portion left then keep it for use later – don’t dish it up just for the sake of it.
3. Saves You Time
Meal planning enables you to save time by knowing in advance what you will be eating. This will avoid the last minute decision of what to cook for the evening meal and having to dig around in the cupboards and deep freeze to see what you have available.
4 Makes Cooking Less Stressful
Meal planning makes cooking less stressful. If the planner is visible in your kitchen this will help reduce the disagreements about what you will be eating on any given day. A meal plan comes handy when you are tired and in a hurry to prepare something to keep energised. You only have to follow the plan and will be done within a short time since all the ingredients you require are ready.
Negatives of Meal Planning
Whereas meal planning has a lot of benefits, sticking to the plan requires a lot of personal discipline which might be a difficult thing for some people at first. Secondly, you might find you end up wasting the ingredients if you fail to stick to the plan. Situations beyond your control can make it hard to follow the plan such as unforeseen work commitments or a family emergency. This would only be a rare occurrence and shouldn’t discourage you from continuing.
How Should I Make My Meal Plan?
If you’re making a meal plan for budgeting reasons rather than dietary or time saving ones then you should be taking stock of what you already have available in your food stores. Keeping tabs on what you have in the cupboards, refrigerator or deep freeze will help cut your food bill.
If you’ve bought ingredients for past weeks meals and not completely used them then consider making meals based on those for the following weeks. If you struggle for ideas of what to make with those ingredients then there are a great number of websites available where you can type in what food you have and it will give you some recipes to try.
If you don’t like the idea of knowing exactly what you will be eating on any given day, because let’s face it you might not fancy the meal you’d planned to have, then make your meal plan a bit more flexible. Why not make a plan of what meals you will be having during the week. This will help with your shopping list but rather than have things set in stone choose on a daily basis and just cross it off your planner as you go.
What Should I Include In My Meal Plan?
Most meal planners seem to focus on the main evening meal, however there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be planning the other meals too. Whether it’s packed lunches for work or school or breakfast these are meals that still need to be prepared at some point. Why not include them on the planner – especially if you find you or your family members get bored with the same lunches on repeat.
What Can I Use To Create My Meal Plan?
There are several options available when it comes to meal planning although it’s probably advisable to keep it as simple as possible. This makes it less likely you won’t it keep up in the long term. It’s a good idea to make sure that whatever method you choose that the meal plan is placed somewhere visible as a reminder.
1. Pen And Paper
The most basic but easy and the cheapest option – grab a pen and a piece of paper, no need for fancy paper – the back of a piece of junk mail will do. Write out the days and then fill in with the meals you will be eating over the next week. You can also buy ready-made pads for this purpose from high street discount stores.
2. Spreadsheet
Set up a template based on the needs of your family and then each week just fill in which meals you will be having on which days.
3. Chalkboard / Whiteboard
Another reasonably cheap method. You can pick up chalkboards and whiteboards at most pound shops / discount chain stores and they’ll last a long time. Just mark out a grid that corresponds to the week and you’re ready to go.
4. Purpose Designed Chalkboard / Magnetic Whiteboard
These will already have the grid for the weekdays laid out. Some also come with a handy shopping notepad attached so that once you’ve added meals to the planner you can write up your shopping list. Click here for a few ideas.
5. Meal Plan Phone Apps
There are quite a few meal planning apps available, mostly free and some provide a shopping list option to help you combine the ingredients from each of them.
It’s worth doing a search at the Google Play app store or the itunes app store depending on your phone operating system and testing them to see if they fit in with your lifestyle.
This option does seem a bit more time consuming than the others especially if you’re having to type in the ingredients for each meal as well in order for the app to produce a shopping list.
