Not to be too basic about it, but I divide our favorites into categories based on flavor profile. These are your building blocks of the meal plan –dishes that you’re happy to eat every month or so. But I don’t need to be reminded I’m eating almond butter toast almost every morning.
Monthly meal planner free#
Make the time to fill out this free monthly meal planner printable, and get off the meal planning hamster wheel for GOOD. Your meal planning can operate completely on auto-pilot. If that’s something you feel you want to schedule, by all means add it to your plan. An hour of work up front has the power to take meal planning completely off your plate for months at a time. Note that I don’t meal plan for breakfast.
The important thing is to keep the information in digital form, so you can make changes easily and copy/paste into a new month each time. If OneNote or Evernote works for you, or if you want to get fancier with a better-designed template, have at it. Write down any proteins/vegetables you want to eat/cook. I like to plan around the vegetables although, it may be easier to think about the protein of each dish. Think about the center of your meals and plan around it.
Monthly meal planner download#
You can download my basic template here and customize it. We are going to plan the month one week at a time. I keep things basic with an Excel spreadsheet, tabbed into multiple lists (the monthly meal plan, a grocery list, a favorite dishes list). Find a data entry method that works for you Here’s how I do it–with an easy downloadable template to help you get started. However, I bet this basic structure could work if you’re starting out as a new meal planner, and once your skills are intact, you can build from there. We’re just two people and now that we eat our lunches and dinners together, it’s a pretty straightforward system. I honestly don’t know if my monthly meal plan strategy will work for any other family or household. Looking at it big picture-style lets me see where we might be getting bored with one kind of meal.Īnd it also stops me from feeling like I have to devise something completely new and exciting every single week. Truthfully, I find making a monthly meal plan to be much easier than trying to reinvent the wheel a week at a time. Meal Planner with Grocery List and Monthly Overview: 52 week meal calendar notebook with grocery list and monthly overview Extra sheets for meal ideas. We started meal planning for one week, then two weeks at a time.Īnd once we were deep into our pandemic quarantine lifestyle, I realized I could do a monthly meal plan. (Yes, pre-pandemic, I actually liked going to the store. Turns out that meal planning is a perfect amalgamation of my OCD tendencies: my love of lists, organization, and grocery stores. No month is ever the same, and with a husband who works nights and sleeps late, it didn’t make sense to try and figure out the logistics of it all.īut in an effort to rein in our grocery budget and make sure Dan had a hot dinner to eat at 9:00 pm each worknight, I started trying to give our meal plan some sort of structure.
Or more accurately, someone who couldn’t manage a meal plan, since I always have a rotating and often quite random assortment of dishes to develop, test, or photograph for clients. I used to think I was the kind of person who didn’t need to meal plan.
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