Make Meal Planning Fun

Meal planning can help you save time, money and energy, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with a fresh new meal plan each week.

One way to keep the meals fresh and fun is to get the kids involved.  Ask your kids what some of their top choices are for dinner for the week and choose one or two.  Your kids will be happy because they’re getting some of their favorites and you’re happy because you’ve got some dinner ideas for the week.

Another idea to make meal planning fun is to have theme nights or theme dinners.  Have a Mexican night one week with all the fixin’s for a taco bar or burrito bar, and have a Chinese “take-in” night the next week where you prepare your own stir fry at home.  You can make these nights even more fun by decorating or using fun plates for your theme nights, or including entertainment such as a movie or book that fits your theme for the night.

Although the point of meal planning is to make dinner easy, it helps to shake things up and plan some fun in your menus as well.  Have fun!

Tips to Make Meal Planning Easy

Do you have trouble coming up with ideas for dinner when you’re working on your meal plan for the week?

Here’s a tip to make meal planning easier for you:

Assign each day a food category or a theme to help you brainstorm ideas for meals. For example…

Sunday – meat and potatoes (or Dad’s favorite)
Monday – chicken
Tuesday – ground beef
Wednesday – leftovers
Thursday – fish or vegetarian
Friday – fun or kids’ favorites
Saturday – eat out or grill out

These are just suggestions to help make meal planning fun and easy!

Is One of Your New Year’s Resolutions to Lose Weight?

If you’re like me, one of your New Year’s resolutions may be to lose weight, or to eat better, or both.  I think those two resolutions make my list every year

Since I started menu planning, eating healthier has become a lot easier because I plan my meals each week and I only buy what I need to cook those meals.

Which means I buy less junk food and I go out to eat less often.

By meal planning, I’m also more conscious of what I eat and therefore I’m more likely to make better decisions.

Sure, I slip up and grab a bag of chips when I’m at the gas station, or I skip the scheduled meal completely for a large pepperoni pizza instead, but for the most part, I know that meal planning has made this family eat healthier at least 90% of the time.

So, speaking of New Year’s resolutions… how are yours going?  So far we have stuck to our meal plan, even during Sunday football (I can’t tell you how bad I wanted chips and dip, but since it wasn’t on the menu this week, we didn’t have any in the house, and I did NOT give in to my urge to go buy some).

Menu Planning Monday – January 12

This is my first time participating in Menu Plan Monday.

I’ve been doing menu planning for a couple of years now, and it will be nice to share my menus and recipes with other people.

I’m looking forward to participating every week!

Here’s my menu for this week:

Monday – spaghetti and meatballs, salad, rolls

Tuesday – chicken breasts, salad, garlic bread

Wednesday – leftovers

Thursday – meatloaf, mashed potatoes, salad

Friday – grilled chicken thighs, baked potatoes, green beans

Saturday – chili, corn bread

Sunday – steak, mac & cheese, salad

For more menu plans, head over to Meal Plan Monday.  Have a great week!