7 Meal Planning Tips You Can’t Live Without

Interested in trying out meal planning but not sure where to begin? To get you started, here are simple tips and ideas:

1. Start with a small, attainable goal. A possible goal could be to plan out 2-3 meals per week in advance and work your way up. Consider the amount of time you realistically have in your schedule to go food shopping and prepare meals. An uninterrupted hour on the weekend is enough to get the majority of meals ready for the upcoming week.
2. Take inventory of ingredients you already have in your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry. Use this catalog to guide your ideas for recipes and potential shopping list. This will help speed up your next grocery store visit.
3. Create theme nights, such as Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, and Pizza Fridays! Themes can streamline planning and be a fun way to involve family members in the preparation!
4. Make the most of your leftovers! Re-purpose leftover dinner ingredients for easy weekday lunches.
5. Prepare a double batch of a freezer-friendly recipe on one day for those busy weeknights.
6. Mix and Match! Batch cook individual meal components.
   • A meat such as chicken or turkey that you can cook and shred to be used as chicken salad, chicken in quesadillas or to add to salads
   • A grain, such as quinoa, brown rice, whole grain pasta
   • Vegetables which you can chop in advance and use to add to a stir fry or a soup.

7. To simplify the process even further, look into:

• • Frozen bags of steamtable veggies
  • Microwavable pouches of whole grain blends or bean blends
  • Pre-chopped vegetables
  • Protein shortcuts such as a skinless, shredded rotisserie chicken or precut chicken pieces, individual pieces of fish etc.