How much time do you spend in the kitchen each night working out what to cook?
How much food waste do you have each week from not using up what’s in the fridge?
How much money do you spend on meals out or take-aways when there’s nothing in the house?
If you answered ‘too much’ to any or all of those questions, keep reading. I want to tell you all about the meal planner I’ve created for my family.
Why a meal planner?
We’re a young family sharing our journey to spend less time and money on everyday family chores, and more time enjoying family life.
After the birth of our daughter Dorothy in August 2022, we found it super hard to balance raising a newborn, enjoying our old hobbies and keeping the family home running vaguely close to ‘normal’. We all know some things have to change to fit in a child, of course they do! We wouldn’t want it any other way. However, there’s some jobs which just have to be done, and mummy & daddy still need time to be themselves too!
We knowing we were spending far too much on food we weren’t eating, and too much time and energy deciding what to eat So I created a meal planner to display on the fridge. It’s fun enough for everyone to want to take part in planning, flexible enough to keep to it each week, and pretty enough to want to look at on display!
How do I create one?
The planner is easy to create, and just takes a few craft supplies to put together, but it’s worth the effort. To start, you just need the meal planner printable from our shop. Next I’ll tell you how I created it, how we use it, and some hints and tips for making your own.
I knew I wanted the planner to be interactive, so I started making a list of all our favourite meals to turn into little labels. After printing and laminating these, I cut them up individually and found a container to store them in near to the planner. Next, I needed an easy way to attach the labels to the planner. I found some old wooden clothes pegs which did the trick! You could easily use sticky tack, velcro or magnets to do the same job though. I decorated my pegs to match with coloured washi tapes. If you don’t have any of these, you can use papers, felt-tip pens or any other method you can think of to decorate them.
I then created the planner sheet, which I also laminated and used self-adhesive magnet strips to attach to my fridge. Again, you could also use sticky-tack, fridge magnets or just tape it on!
How do I Use the Planner?
We now use the planner every week to plan our meals and write our shopping list. We sit down as a family once per week and sort through the meal labels to find meals we fancy. Then we look at the calendar to see where we need a quick meal, a slow-cooker meal, or have some time to do something a bit fancy. Once we’ve made our final selections, we pop the labels into the pegs – job done! Some weeks, we remember a meal we haven’t had for a while and pop it in the suggestions box, then we have some ideas to start us off for the next week.
After doing this, we write our shopping list. We store all our recipes in the Cozi family organiser app, which also creates the list. We just have to copy the meal plan into the calendar on the app and add the ingredients to the list. I then look at the cupboards and cross off anything we already have (although once you’re in the swing of this, you can do it from memory most of the time!), and sort the list into categories I have set up in the Cozi app, in the order of the shop layout, just to make the shopping trip a little easier!
Once all this is done, you know what you’re doing each day and can fit the meals easily around your lifestyle. However, if everything goes out the window one day, you can easily swap a meal with another day, or pop it into suggestions so you remember to have it next week – as you’ve already bought the ingredients.
Hopefully this has shown you just one way we’ve helped ourselves to settle into family life and find ways to make the jobs that need doing just a little bit easier. We’ve also loved exploring play, weaning, and reaching milestones – finding out all the things new parents suddenly have to become world experts in!
What else can you help with?
To help us to organise our time, we’ve created loads of digital files and printables which have changed the way we function for the better, and so we wanted to share these with you!
In our shop, you can find everything – from our family meal planner, to play ideas, colouring sheets and much more. We’re always expanding our offering and keen to hear what you need to support your family to enjoy their journey – leave your ideas in the comments, or drop us a message!