How To: Meal Planning

I love meal planning because I just love planning things in general, but also because it saves me time and money. There is nothing more frustrating that spending one hour and $200 at the grocery store only to have "nothing to eat" in the house three days later. When I don't meal plan I end up with a house full of food but nothing to make a meal with, and a ton a spoiled veggies.

I started meal planning long before it became a necessity and have had plenty of time to master my system. I feel like meal planning is a very personal process. Certain things I do may not be necessary for you and you might have faster way of getting the job done. This is definitely not the only way to meal plan, so take this concept and tweak it so it works for you!

What you'll need to start meal planning:
          - notebook
          - recipes
          - shopping list pad
          - meal planning pad (optional)
          - a killer pen that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside......I have a bit of a pen obsession....

In true Kendra fashion I get most of my supplies from Dollarama/Dollar Tree. Why spend $5 on a notebook when you can spend $1.25 for basically the same thing? Personally I like keeping all my recipes written down in a book because going online to look at them all the time gets on my nerves. A binder with everything typed out (and maybe a photo of what each recipe looks like) would also be pretty stellar if you have the time to put it together. In the top left corner of each page I like to give each recipe a short, one word, review so that I know for next time if I should bother with a recipe or not. I secretly hope that one day Roman and Bianca are fighting over these recipe books because they are filled with all their favorite meals.

Finding good recipes is obviously key to meal planning and freezer cooking. If you're new to freezer cooking I suggest checking out a website like Once A Month Meals. For a small annual fee you can subscribe to their website and get access to tons of recipes as well as prep, freezing, and thawing directions for each recipe. Once you get the hang of freezer cooking you can pretty much figure out how to turn any meal into a freezer meal.

I LOVE making lists so I have a ton of these note pads kicking around the house. In fact, Santa even dropped some off in my stocking at Mom & ad's house at Christmas time.  Santa is a smart dude, he really gets me. If you don't have a meal planning pad, you can also use the same list pad that you use for you shopping list. I came across this one on Zulily but I know you can also find them at Chapters.

The number of recipes you select is going to depend on how many days you want to prep meals for and how much time you have to cook. I freezer cook every two weeks, so I try to have enough meals to cover suppers for each of those days. Obviously there are going to be leftovers, which are great for lunches, but they will also likely cover 1-2 suppers, which means I have extra meals that will carry over to the next week.

On my meal planning pad I write down each recipe I want to make and all the ingredients I need to make it. *TIP: if you also write down the amount of each ingredient you need you can be sure to buy the exact amount you need. This saves on having a bunch of leftover ingredients and having them spoil, or not having enough ingredients because you only bought 3 peppers when you actually needed 7. Once I have all my meals and ingredients written down, I head into the kitchen to see what I have. There is no point in buying more garlic powder if you have an entire bag of it already.

The last step is to make a grocery list of everything that you need to make your meals, as well as anything else you need to pick up (obviously). If you've read my "Tips for shopping at Superstore" post then you're familiar with my system of writing my grocery list. I always wright down what I need in the order I encounter them so I don't have to run all over the store looking for things, and I don't have to scan my entire list every time I go to a new area of the store.