How to Start Meal Planning for Your Family (Even If You Hate It)

I don’t understand why we treat meal planning and cooking, homemaking, and running a household as if they’re innate skills we’re all born with, or as if our mothers automatically taught us how to do them properly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Imagine if we treated any other job or profession the same way—something we could just walk into and instantly master? Let’s give domestic work back the value and respect it deserves.

Meal Planning Sounds Like A Great Idea

Save time, eat better, and stress less about dinner. But actually sticking with it? How about even getting started when faced with something new and seemingly overwhelming?

That’s the hard part.

I’m not going to tell you that meal planning is just oh so easy—because if you’ve never attempted it before, it’s kinda not.

What I am going to tell you is that it can be conquered and mastered. Like many other things, you need someone to teach you a proper system for doing something new. In time, you do master it, and it becomes second nature.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or behind, I assure you that you’re not alone in feeling this way, and you’re not behind schedule.

I’ve been where you are. I taught myself how to do this, and now I will preach it from the rooftops—meal planning is a crucial system for every family to master, saving money, eating wholesome foods, and eliminating the monotony of cooking and grocery shopping.

This is a meal planning guide for beginners, and I will break it down step by step.

Finally, I’ll show you a sample 7-day real food meal plan my own family loves.

Begin by defining your values and goals related to food and eating.

I’ll start by telling you mine. You don’t have to copy what I do, just use my example as a way to get your own thoughts flowing.

In my household, we do not eat ultra-processed foods. Meals are made up of whole food ingredients.

You may be on the opposite end or somewhere in the middle of this, which doesn’t matter.

The only reason I’m bringing this up is that you need to be honest with yourself about your meal planning goals, which should be based on the foods you eat and consider important.

And you can’t make changes if you don’t start with honesty.

In my home, I’m going to do the following things:

• Bone broth (soups and stews) daily.
• Eggs daily.
• Liver weekly.
• Fish or seafood weekly.
• Only sourdough bread and wheat products.
• Properly prepared grains (soaked, sprouted, soured, etc.)

Considering the above, I already have a good starting point for planning my weekly or monthly recipes.

Next, I will consider my budget. Do you know yours, or do you wing it?

In America, the average monthly grocery spending for a family of four can range from $800 to $ 1,300, depending on the State, with Hawaii being the most expensive.

Every family has their budget, though. And I’ll go ahead and repeat myself now: meal planning will save you money and reduce waste.

Be realistic about what you can afford, but if you’re spending more than the average, it’s a good sign that you can make cuts and still eat well. Most people have not been taught how to shop for groceries correctly, resulting in unnecessary spending.

Your goals and plans will also depend on factors such as whether you’re a stay-at-home mother or you work outside the home. You can still cook from scratch and meal plan with a career, but you will likely want to focus more on ingredient prep, slow cooker recipes, and freezer meals.

Related: Here’s How I Cut My Family’s Grocery Budget By Thousands of Dollars

Start By Taking Note of and Shopping Your Pantry

Open up your fridge, freezers, and pantries.

What’s lurking in there?

Year-old trout from last summer’s fishing trip? Maybe you have a chest freezer full of beef from the 1/2 cow you split with your family? Fresh mustard greens and beets from the farmer’s market that will go bad soon if you don’t actually use them by tomorrow?

Don’t neglect your dry goods. Those areas of our kitchen can quickly pile up with cans of vegetables, beans, grains, stale spices and seasonings, and things bought on sale and put away without an inventory system to be forgotten for months or years.

Use your food.

Create a list of proteins that you need to use or would like to use first. Then, a list of greens that are going to expire and become compost. Add to that the grains that can round out a meal.

Let’s say you find a whole tray of frozen chicken breasts that should really get used up, as they’ve been in there so long you don’t remember when you bought them.

Make a plan to defrost the meat and then make something like my 3-ingredient slow cooker salsa chicken.

I’m highlighting a recipe like that because it’s just so basic that a toddler could make it, but also versatile and helpful for busy families to have a prepared protein ready to reheat and go. You can eat that salsa chicken with tacos, rice, beans, roasted vegetables, and mashed potatoes throughout the week.

Make a list of what sides you would like to make and try to use up what you have on hand first before adding the rest to your grocery shopping list.

Look up recipes that feature the ingredients you have and save or print them. Having a physical recipe binder is not a bad idea, either.

Shop The Sales Next

After looking at what you have, shop your local sales to decide what you will buy from the grocery store.

Every single grocer will have their flyers and sales posted on their respective websites, available in an app, or emailed directly to you.

You can also use an app that does this for you automatically and even notifies you when your favorite items go on sale at your favorite grocery stores.

Scan the sales and take note of what you’re missing. Buy in bulk when possible; it’s one of my best tips to save money on groceries.

Related: How I Cut My Family Grocery Budget By Thousands of Dollars

Make Use of Technology

My house was built by hand in 1865 by a family of Scottish settlers who had 15 children in one room (all of whom survived to adulthood) and cooked every meal in cast iron implements over an open fire, which was also their only source of heat.

They had no plumbing, electricity, grocery delivery services, and certainly no slow cookers, rice makers, refrigerators, or fancy ranges that light up with a simple switch.

My mother grew up similarly as the youngest daughter of 8 children in a post-WWII Yugoslavian village.

My life (and yours) is by comparison an absolute paradise of untold privilege. Our ancestors are so proud of us with the helpful tools we have access to, so let’s make use of them to simplify our lives and complain less.

Here are some of my favorites:

Plan & Prep Ahead

What can be planned and prepped ahead of time to make cooking homemade foods from scratch easier?

For starters, you can make salad dressings and refrigerate them. You can premake marinades and seasoning mixes. Review your planned meals for the week and identify which components can be prepared ahead of time.

You can prepare cold proteins, such as hard-boiled eggs, egg salad, hummus, and chicken salad, to have on hand for lunches and snacks throughout the week.

Related: 20 Fresh Ingredients I Prep to Make Homemade Cooking a Breeze

Make Freezer Meals and Complete Meals in Jars

If you have a pressure canner, set aside regular times to create simple yet wholesome meals in jars, such as soups and stews, or even already prepped meats ready to reheat and serve.

Set aside regular times to make freezer meals, which can be popped into a slow cooker. There are many recipes for these online, and I’m in the process of developing many of my own for The Peasant’s Daughter as well as for Heritage Kitchen Revival.

Every 1-2 months, I set aside an afternoon to create anywhere from 30 to 60 of these meals at once, and I ensure they’re packed with protein and vegetables. The night before I plan to make one, I take it out of the freezer to defrost in the refrigerator.

Then, in the morning, I pop it into my slow cooker to cook all day. I make sure to craft recipes that can withstand being cooked all day with a finicky method, such as a slow cooker, while still being delicious at dinner time, instead of being tasteless mush.

Freezer meals are essential for meal planning because unexpected things will inevitably happen, not just sickness or emergencies, but also good things like a last-minute concert or an invitation to a bonfire at your best friend’s house. When the unexpected bad and good things happen, you will always be prepared.

Let’s get to a realistic 7-day sample meal plan that I use for my own family.

Afterwards, I’ll explain some key features that make this feasible and simple for me.