For me, meal planning is a HUGE time saver. If I didn't plan meals once a week, I'd spend so much time coming home, thinking "what am I going to fix", then spending time figuring out what I have, then going to the store for what I'm missing ... etc. etc.
Instead I plan my weeks meals on Sunday afternoon/evening - usually while sitting on the sofa with DH watching football.
I start with a quick check of what I have in the fridge/freezer - not a hard count, just an eyeball that I have some chicken, I have some ground beef, I have lentils, I have rice, I have pasta, etc. Then I sit down with my laptop and my spreadsheet and start entering meals.
Here's a screenshot of this weeks spreadsheet, which then gets printed and posted on the fridge. You can see that I make notes to myself about some meals and I have a dinner out planned as well.
So as you can see, breakfast is the same thing - either oats or yogurt, fruit, and coffee. So that's easy.
Dinner is next: I plan dinner for 6 days, allowing one day for eating out. My DH is all about meat and potatoes and veggies ... so I base most of my meals around a meat. I might do a veggie meal a week, but even then, I try to make it optional for DH to add a grilled chicken breast or some sausage if he wants to cook his own. I keep a list of recipes that I'd like to try and sometimes I have pages torn out of my Cooking Light or bookmarked on the web that I will add to the list. I also try to plan meals that there will be leftovers for lunch the next day.
Once all the dinners are filled in, I plan my lunches based on the previous nights dinner. If the previous nights dinner doesn't have leftovers, then I'll plan sandwiches or I'll make that the day I eat lunch out with a friend or collegue.
Weekends are a little looser, since we might wind up eating out or I might wind up snacking on veggies and popcorn during the ball game, so while I plan the weekends, usually only the dinner part stays consistent.
Then I go back through everything I've planned on my grid and add whatever we don't have in the pantry/fridge/freezer to my grocery list below. I take it meal by meal and then x2 something that I'll use for more than one meal.
You can see there's nothing under the Sam's/Costco heading, since we went to Sam's less than 2 weeks ago and bought chicken, salmon, burger, pork loin, rice, a case of canned diced tomatoes, a case of tomato paste, etc., etc. As those things run low, I'll add them to the list and in about 2 weeks or so, we'll make another big Sam's Club trip.
You can also see that most of what I buy each week winds up being veggies and fruit. I'll also, while I'm at the store, pick up whatever other veggies and fruit is on sale for snacks. Or, if I find something that's on sale that looks really good, I might change the menu around it ... but I'll have the whole thing with me when I shop, so I can make that decision on the fly.
The whole process takes me about 30-40 minutes at home - to check the pantry/fridge, fill out the grid, make the shopping list. (Unless I'm fooling around with recipes, in which case it might take me longer, but that's mostly cause I'm having fun.)
Then the grocery shopping part takes me another hour including driving time.
But the best part is that every night when I get home, I know exactly what I'm going to fix, and I know that I have everything I need there. And I know exactly what to pack for lunch the next day, so after dinner I can pack my lunch and put it in the fridge and just grab it and go the next morning.
It makes my life SO much easier.
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