Weekly Meal Planning

A few weeks ago, I posted a survey in my Instagram story asking what my friends would to hear about on MFC's Recipes and Instagram after my Adult Lunches at Home series ended, and of the two choices I gave them, nearly 100% of the people who voted asked for meal planning ideas.  I'm not going to lie, I was thrilled to hear that, because I've gotten pretty efficient at meal planning, 5 nights, by 5 nights, by 5 night, over the past 30 years.

In this weekly meal planning guide, I’ve captured what works best for me and my family. Those of you who asked for a look at this topic will information that will make your meal-planning life easier and even a little bit more fun. Now, I'm a passionate home cook who loves fresh ingredients and whole(ish) foods, so I'm not promising you're going to hear about the absolute fastest or easiest ways to deliver dinner to the table, just more efficient ways to plan, shop and cook mostly from scratch. If you loathe cooking, my magic may not be the magic you seek. Although I do wonder if my magic might make you loathe cooking a little less.

Take a look at the quick video I made about Meal Planning on Instagram right here.

In the Weekly Planning Guide, you'll see how I break down long culinary weeks into manageable bite-sized pieces in the form of theme nights. I show you what my weeks and month look like, planned around each of my five nightly themes. It sounds like a party every night, doesn't it? What it really does is narrow the entire wide universe of meal choices to just a handful per theme, and that makes my planning life easier in a dozen little ways.

This guide maps out my seven best strategies for easy meal planning:

• Repeating daily themes to narrow your nightly choices
• Creating short list of favorite meals for each theme
• Shopping BIG and stocking a month’s (or more) supply of ingredients for themes/meals
• Batch prepping basic ingredients ahead for quick, easy weeknight cooking
• Using some meal components in multiple ways per week/month
• Making/freezing extra meals for busy days/weeks
• It also provides you a template into which you can plug your own themes and meals, including live links to your favorite online recipes for easy list-making and cooking straight from the plan*

I'm excited to share the guide with you.  Most of the concepts are really simple activities you probably already do in some form, but sometimes it helps to have a more formal, defined process or formula to make things we do unconsciously sort of click and work more quickly and easily, and they become actual strategic, helpful habits. I love a strategic, helpful habit.

If you want your own copy of the meal planning guide, just click on "Send me the free Meal Planning Guide" in the menu bar on the right side of your screen. From there, you'll just type in your email address and I'll grab that and send you an email with the links for both the Keynote (Apple users) and Powerpoint (everyone else) files. I would love to have just linked the files here, but it's a complicated world, the internet. And don't worry, my fear and loathing of email probably outmatches yours, so I promise I'm not going to send you three emails a day going forward. You'll probably only hear from me again via email if I've become world famous and published a cookbook or something.