Meal Planning (With Links to Recipes!)

Meal planning. You either love it and jump right in or hate it. Hate it with a fiery passion that burns in your soul until one day you’re forced to figure it out and search the internet at 3:00 in the morning for ideas which leads you here to this charming blog.

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Meal planning is as complicated or simple as you want it to be. For some reason over the last several years meal planning and feeding the family has become some kind of weird, pinterest centered, perfection oriented, multi course fiasco which (at least for me and my family) is just too much to handle and unnecessary. Now you may be someone who loves providing multicourse meals and that fills up your metaphorical cup but I personally don’t want to do that so here we.

I designed our meal plan super simply by using themes. I’m all about themes recently, no idea why. Each day of the week has a focus. After I figured out what I wanted the theme to be each day of the week, I wrote each down as a heading in a Google Keep note and wrote 5 - 6 meals under each heading.

Meal Themes and Recipes

Monday - Veggie

Veggie dinners are super easy to prep ingredients beforehand. I like to prepare everything I need while I prepare breakfast. Just chop everything up, place in a bowl, cover and store until you’re ready to cook.

• Veggie bowl

• Vegetarian pad Thai with green salad

• Veggie enchilada with green salad

• Ramen stir fry with veggies

• Chickpea and spinach curry over jasmine rice

Tuesday - Fish

• Salmon sushi bowl

• Baked salmon with seasonal veggie and rice

• Shrimp fajitas bowl

  • Just throw as much good stuff in a bowl as possible. Add shrimp and then throw together a simple spicy mayo sauce. Boom.

• Shrimp taco bowl

Wednesday - Pasta

• Pesto pasta with prachstto, garlic bread and green salad

  • Make this easy and buy premade pesto sauce, I definitely do. Especially with the cost of pine nuts, am I right?!

• Rigatoni with veggie sauce and garlic bread

  • This is an awesome way to eat a LOT of veggies without kids knowing. My daughter LOVES this (and we all do)

• Red sauce pappardelle pasta with green salad

  • Again, make this easy and buy the pasta sauce.

• Fettuccine Alfredo with garlic bread and green salad

  • Easier to buy the sauce, but homemade alfredo is solid.

Thursday - Chicken

• Chicken cast iron skillet with rice and broccoli

• Slow Cooker BBQ chicken with rice and seasonal veggie

  • So good. Sometimes I change our meal plan to make this twice a month.

• Homemade chicken fingers with French fries and green salad

  • This is way easier to make than you think.

• Slow Cooker butter chicken with rice and seasonal veggie

  • I use premade sauce to make this super quick

• Slow cooker honey teriyaki chicken with rice and seasonal veggie

Friday - Fun

• Homemade pizza and salad

• Steak and chips on the BBQ

• Kielbasa skillet

• Cast iron shepherd’s pie

• Egg roll in a bowl

• Lasagna soup

• Beef lasagna

Saturday - Crockpot or Chill

• Slow cooker vegetarian chili with sourdough bread

• Hamburgers / cheeseburgers and fries

  • Pretty self explanatory.

• Fish and chips

  • My Husband makes these fresh!

• Potato soup with sourdough bread or baguette

• Poor man’s stew with biscuits

Sunday- Roast (Sunday Lunch)

• Sunday lunch was a tradition in my husband’s family and we carry it on with our own. My husband will prepare a roast and all the sides to eat a late lunch / early dinner on Sunday’s.

The Next Step

After I have my list of daily themes and recipes, all that’s left is to do is grab a calendar and write down my meals! I love Printabulls for my meal planning calendars. They have a lot of space to write, easy to download and they are super pretty.

In the Monday column I go down my list writing down one meal per slot, then Tuesday, Wednesday etc, etc. Boom done.

The extra mile

The final and extra mile step is preparing weekly grocery shop lists. I cut out four pieces of cardstock, label the date I plan on shopping at the top and then the headings fruit, veggies, dairy, misc, meat and grain. I will quickly look through each recipe and write down any ingredients I’ll need to pick up during that weeks shop. I keep these lists on my fridge clipped bellow my meal planning calendar.

Got some time? Looking for more stuff to read? Check out these posts!

• This is a throwback to 2019 where I share our capsule menu! Totally still relevant.

• My love for Quicken runs deep.

• This isn’t a link. Just wanted to tell you how great you’re doing today.