With the free printable meal planner as a guide, you've got an almost-fool proof system for a cheaper, healthier, less wasteful diet. Get started planning meals with these awesome sheets, available in print-ready PDF format. Ordering online for pickup is usually free (or super cheap), and it ends up saving sooo much money in the long run. It's habit, and it's good marketing, but it's not good budgeting. Ice cream (my weakness), junky snacks, extra food that I won't eat, and things that I just don't need always seem to find their way into my cart. I don't know about you, but particularly when I'm not meal prepping, I'm such a sucker for extras at the grocery store. I first heard Milena Ciciotti talking about how she and her husband always order on Instacart, which actually saves them money, and thought it was genius. We both enjoy cooking but don't want to have to do a big meal every night, so making things that reheat well and taste good a couple days late is a big win.Īfter picking those recipes, we'll schedule them into the meal planner, write down our groceries, and THEN - this hack literally changed the way I meal prep and buy food - we order everything for online pickup. For portion reference, I meal prep with my boyfriend, and we usually pick 3 recipes that we want to eat that week for lunch/dinner (lunch is usually leftovers). Once a week, usually on the weekend, I'll sit down with my computer and open up Pinterest. As you can tell, the free download has sections for every day of the week, as well as a spot for a grocery list where you can write everything down. When it comes to using the meal planner printable, things are pretty straightforward. This is saving me more money than ever & helping me eat healthy and stop wasting food. Not only am I dropping this totally free printable meal planner for you, but I'm also going to give you my entire update meal prep strategy. You can either print out the free meal planner every week, or for a more sustainable option, get it laminated at Staples or Office Depot to just wipe + reuse with dry erase markers! I love having my grocery list right next to my meal planner - it just makes it SO simple to write down what I need for each recipe, and I never forget anything. I've laid it out with a spot for notes on each day, as well as a separate section for shopping items. This meal planner printable is free, simple, easy, and super cute (what more could you want?!). Both my food costs + stress levels skyrocketed when I stopped meal prepping, so I've been very focused on rebuilding the habit in my life.
As some of you may remember from my post on How to Start Meal Prepping, I'm a huge fan of meal planning and prepping - in fact, it saved my life as a broke student.īut in quarantine, I fell out of the pattern of meal prepping, and man did I pay for it. Pinterest has always been my go to but recently I found $5 meal plan and it has been SO helpful! I wish I knew about it sooner! I get frugal new recipes emailed to me every week with a shopping list! Seriously, it’s amazing.I am SO freaking excited to show you this printable meal planner. How do I come up with new meal ideas to try? Variety is the spice of life, so they say. More importantly, keeps us from eating the same meals over and over again. Keeping an ongoing list of meals that my picky family actually likes keeps me from scratching my head every week to come up with what’s for dinner. To say that my home is full of picky eaters is an understatement. I’ve been using the ‘meals we love’ printable for quite awhile now and it has probably helped take away the stress and overwhelm of dinner time more than anything.
Let’s talk about the ‘meals we love’ printable! I do have a version of this in my post How to Afford to be a Stay at Home Mom, but I wanted to update it to coordinate with the other printables in this set. From there you can download and print! Meals We Love Printable Simply click the each printable image to access the PDF. How to Download the Meal Planner Printables:
Should you make a purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Well fear not! I created a real game changer of a printable for planning out dinner time and I am so excited to share it with you! Every single week I went through the same struggle, what in the world are we going to have for dinner? Then there was the overwhelm of effectively grocery shopping when I still wasn’t even sure what our meals were going to be.