Today, I want to talk to you about the #1 time and money saver that I believe everyone should keep in their planner! That time and money saver is Meal Planning. As you may remember, earlier this week I announced the release of the Master Meal Planner printable insert bundle, and today I want to explain more to you about those inserts, how to use them and the process I follow to plan and prepare my meals each week.
My goal in creating the Master Meal Planner Inserts, as is my goal with all my products, is to share information and tools to help make your life better. From my years of studying and researching the topics of productivity and planning, I have found that although no two lives are the same, there are essential strategies that can be used by nearly anyone to set better expectations, streamline their tasks and ultimately reallocate their time towards higher priorities. Much thought, planning and feedback from my community went into creating this tool to make it as useful and actionable as possible.
My hope is that this meal planning tool helps you close the gap, learn an essential process and strategy for time management, and helps you reallocate time to your goals so that you too can develop an action oriented attitude towards your life. Whether or not you understand it at this point in time, when you purchase a tool like the Master Meal Planner, you’re taking a major step in the right direction to help you get your life in order. You’re making an investment in your future and in yourself that most fail to make. There is nothing more important in my mind than acknowledging your shortcomings and then making an effort to correct them- it’s the basis of all progress and the precise reason why human beings are able to achieve wonderful and sometimes miraculous feats. So, I know that when you purchase the Master Meal Planner inserts, you are taking a step towards a better and more fulfilling life!
The final thing I want to share with you before we begin with today’s topic, is that in the circle of life there is no right or wrong time to start getting your life in order and making your dreams a reality. It is never too early or too late to begin taking actions to design the life you have always wished to lead. If the only time is the present, then the present is where we must begin.
The #1 Time & Money Saver Everyone Should Keep in their Planner
How often do situations like these happen to you?
• It’s dinner time and you’re starving, but when you open your fridge you have no clue what to make. You shift around some raw ingredients, pace back and forth to your pantry but you are absolutely stumped. Yes, there is food in their, but no meals. You order delivery instead.
• It’s the end of the week and the fridge is empty- time for a grocery shop. You get to the grocery store and walk around looking at everything trying to piece together meal ideas in your head. You pull out your phone to search pinterest, but alas, your grocery store gets terrible reception. You have a few go to meals that you can rely on in your memory, but you are completely unprepared and can’t remember what ingredients you have at home or all the ingredients you even need to begin with. You walk around purchasing everything you can think of, hoping for the best and spending way to much money on random things that may not even form a complete meal. When you get home, you find you’ve forgotten a few key ingredients but purchased extra things that won’t even go into the meals for your week. Whatever, you’ll make it work, right?
• You are dead set on sticking to this new healthy eating plan. You have the recipes, you know what you can and cannot eat on the plan, everything is set, right? Wrong. A busy day hits and you’ve forgotten to pack your lunch, so you power through without eating, not wanting to make a mistake on your new plan. Once you get home, you are starving and although you have what you need at home to prepare your healthy dinner, it’s so much chopping and then a 30 minute cook time on top of that. You cave, and have a snack that is not quite on plan while you decide what to do. Instead of taking action, your hunger cues kick in and you grab another questionable snack while you think. One thing leads to another and suddenly you realize you’ve eaten a complete box of snacks instead of just buckling down to make that healthy dinner you had ready to prepare in the fridge. Ugh!
Look, if any of these situations sound like you, let me reassure you, I have been there too! I don’t know what it is about cooking and meal times, but even when we have food in the fridge and the best of intentions, we often make very poor decisions that ultimately cost us time, money and our will power. This is why I firmly believe that Meal Planning (and Prep!) is the #1 Time and Money Saver Everyone Should Keep in their Planner! Thanks to my meal planning practice, meal time now looks less like those situations above and more like this:
• It’s dinner time and I head to the fridge, there in storage containers are my dinner options for the week. I decide between one meal or another, pull out the prepared ingredients, plate my portion, heat it up and enjoy! Dinner now takes me all of 5 minutes to prepare.
• I’m starting to get a little hungry but I have some time to spare to prep something from scratch. I take a glance at my meal planner and remember that I bought the ingredients to make avocado toast for some lunches this week. I head to the kitchen and whip up one of my favorite quick and easy lunches.
• It’s Saturday morning and I’ve been sticking to this new healthy eating plan all week, so it’s time for a little treat. Luckily, I prepped a few on-plan muffins precisely for this moment of sudden craving. Diet disaster averted!
Aren’t these situations so much nicer to encounter throughout our week than the alternative? I think so, and that’s why I am a dedicated weekly meal planner and prep-er! Yes, meal planning and prepping can take up a good block of time, but it’s time I plan for and time that I save (or should I say, saves me) throughout the week from deciding, preparing and cooking meals.
And my meal planning and prepping process is made infinitely more easy, thanks to the use of the Master Meal Planner Inserts. So, let me explain what exactly those are and how you use them.
How to use the Master Meal Planner Inserts
Let me guide you through the inserts included in the Master Meal Planner and how to use each to maximize your meal planning process!
• The first set of inserts of the Master Meal Planner are called the Meal Master Lists. These inserts are where you can list out all the different meals you make or want to make and then check off the category for each. The categories for meals are breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack/dessert. When listing out each meal name, you can designate one or more of these categories by check mark to quickly locate meal inspiration when planning. There are a few different ways you can organize meals on this list. The first is to just do a complete brain dump of all the meals you can think of and then add more as time goes on. The next option is to dedicate a page or a spread to a collection of recipes for each season, for each member of your family that you cook for, or by dietary restrictions. For example, you could make a dedicated list for your favorite meals and another for your partner, child, etc. You could use one sheet for vegetarian meals, another for gluten free, or any other dietary restriction or category that applies to you. You could even dedicate sheets to cooking methods like BBQ recipes, crock pot meals, or freezer meals. As the meal planner inserts are print on demand, you have the space to play around with these lists in different ways that make sense to your lifestyle so consider those options and how you can add an extra level of organization to your meal planning process through the organization of your meal lists.
• The second set of inserts in this planner are the Weekly Meal Plans and consist of two worksheets, a grocery list and a meal planning matrix. Again, as the inserts are print on demand, it is up to you whether you want to use one set of these inserts for your whole family or break out meal plans for individuals if you prepare different meals for different folks. Also, it will be up to you whether or not you meal plan for one week at a time or more, however, the plans are organized per week and broken down into breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack columns with rows for each day beginning with Monday.
• The third and final set of inserts in this planner are the Recipes. This section is a dedicated area where you can track recipes relating to the meals on your master list. Each recipe worksheet is a two page spread which should be enough room for you to write out even longer recipes, or feel free to paste in printed recipes or recipe cards onto these pages if that suits you better.
The Meal Planning Process
Finally, let me outline for you the basic meal planning process I use and recommend.
Meal Planning is the process of predetermining your meals for a specific period of time, either a week or perhaps even up to a month at one time. Once you have a plan in place for your menu, you can take some time each week to do meal preparation, cooking and/or portioning out food for your weekly meals and storing them properly for future meal times. Meal Planning and Prepping can be an excellent way to keep yourself on track if you are following a specific diet, but even if you are not, it is both a major time and money saver as you are able to define a menu ahead of time and bulk prepare meals. Prepared and portioned meals can be a life saver when your week gets busy or if unexpected events inevitably disrupt your week and normal eating patterns.
Step #1: Make a list of all of the meals and snacks you would like to eat and can prepare at home. Break down the meals into categories for the meal time they belong to, for example, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, or dessert. Make sure that you either know how to make these meals already, or have the recipes saved somewhere for easy access, such as in a recipe book, or saved on a Pinterest board.
Step #2: Plan out your meals for each day, for the length of time you desire, from at least 1 week to up to 1 month maximum. Although the amount of time you choose to plan out is up to you, I find that planning any more than a month in advance can be a little too much as plans, tastes or cravings can change.
Step #3: On a day of your choosing before the next week begins, make a list of groceries you will need to prepare all your meals and snacks for just the coming week and then shop for them. If you follow store sales and want to stock up on frozen or non-perishable items for future weeks as well, that is fine, just keep in mind that it’s not advisable to fully prepare more than one weeks worth of food at one time, simply because the food would most likely spoil.
Optional: Weekly Meal Prep
Once you have completed your menu planning and grocery shopping for the week (or more) you may want to take your meal planning process one step further by doing some meal prep! This is a process that I undertake the weekend before a new week begins, and I find that it saves me a tremendous amount of time, energy and stress when I have all my meals prepared for the week instead of having to prepare them one by one each day.
When it comes to meal prep, you can choose to be like me and cook and store all your meals for the week ahead of time, or you can be more selective about the preparation you do.
Option 1: Precook and store all meals. Once you have your menu planned and groceries purchased, dedicate a portion of the day 2-4 hours depending on the length of your recipes, to bulk cook all meals. When I do this, I choose meals for the week that have similar cooking times or temperatures so that I can prepare the ingredients and then cook multiple meals at once in the oven, on the stovetop, in my crock pot, bbq or even air fryer. It might seem like a lot of work to do at one time, and perhaps the first few rounds of this might take a bit longer, but as you get used to the process, you’ll naturally begin to understand how to streamline and optimize even further. Once everything is cooked, depending on the meal, I make sure to properly store each item to retain freshness. Most items I cook go into the refrigerator, are sealed and handled properly, and are eaten within a week. If you are skeptical of storing meals for this length of time before eating, one major tip I have for you is just to practice good food safety. As most of my meals are stored and eaten over several days, I remove portions from storage with clean utensils and heat them up individually. I don’t let stored food out of the refrigerator for more than a few minutes to prevent contamination or spoil. I also tend to only prepare as much of the meal as necessary to maximize freshness, so toppings are usually added at the time of consumption, again as a measure to prevent spoilage.
Option 2: Precook select meals. If you don’t like the idea of having all your meals ready to go for the week, you can choose to precook a few meals to have on hand. For this I’d recommend focusing on preparing bulk dinners or tedious meals like school lunches that you won’t want to forget about. It’s easy enough to cook a large batch of a favorite dinner and consume it over a few nights and that becomes a great way to ensure you have something ready to go and don’t need to turn to delivery or fast food if time gets tight. You could also prep a few freezer meals- recipes that you can precook and keep in the freezer and defrost or finish cooking at a later time. Again, even these semi-prepared meals can save you time during the week or prepare for situations where the main cook of the household might not have the time to get the job done and needs to pass the baton to another.
Option 3: Prepare and Package Ingredients. Perhaps your meal choices require fresh preparation each day, but you can save yourself some work by cleaning, cutting and portioning ingredients ahead of time. Anything you can do to save yourself time during the busy week by cutting down on prep or cleaning will be valuable. So cleaning, slicing and storing fruit, making a batch of hard boiled eggs, rolling up lunch meat, or even just dividing something like a tub of yogurt or snacks into ready to go portions can be a life saver!
Well, I know that was a lot of great information, and now you should have a clearer idea of the purpose of the Master Meal Planner, the inserts included with it, and now understand the general process for meal planning. Now, I think you can see how Meal Planning is truly the #1 Time and Money Saver Everyone Should Keep in their Planner! If you agree, click the button below to purchase your Master Meal Planner and get started planning, organizing and prepping your meals asap! I know establishing this practice will be a game changer for your life and time management for sure. Can’t wait to see what you cook up with the help of this awesome tool!
If you have any other questions about the Master Meal Planner, feel free to let me know in a comment and I’d be glad to help you!
xoxo,