One of the ways that you can eat nutritious meals is to utilize meal planning. Many people avoid doing this because they think it has to be a lot of work. After you have been gone to work all day or all week, the last thing you want to do is more work. The great thing is that you can make meal planning simple. Today you will find the best tips for making this happen. It is going to improve your health, reduce your stress regarding meal planning and help you to eat more nutritiously as well.
Use Your Calendar
One of the first ways that you can make meal planning simple is to use your calendar. When looking at your calendar, you may already see a full load of family time, appointments and errands you need to run. Now you will need to add in a menu of meals so you don’t have to guess at what you will need to prep for each day. You can even have others in the house help you come up with themed weeks. One week you may want to have more chicken than other foods. Another week you may want to focus on Mexican made dishes. If you are going to work late on Thursdays, you could have leftovers that night. Use your calendar to help you prep and plan your meals.
Cooking the Perishables Before Other Things
When doing your meal planning, you should focus on cooking the perishables before other things. If you have vegetables, fruits or cheese that will be expiring soon, focus on using those in the meals earlier in the week. This way you aren’t losing money on wasted food and you are still getting to eat the nutritious food as well.
Have a List
Whenever you run out of healthy foods, you need to have a list of what you don’t have. This way, whenever you plan to go grocery shopping, you can pick it up. You should keep your list on the fridge or somewhere convenient. If someone in the house uses the last of the green peppers, they can write it down on the list. Keeping the list updated is the key to knowing what you will need for your meals.
Have a Stocked Freezer
Meal prepping is also made easier when you have a stocked freezer. You can stock it with fish, chicken, steak, pork chops, vegetables and other foods. When you plan a meal, prep all the foods that can be frozen and put them into the freezer. When it comes time to make that meal, you will already have it ready. It will only need thawed out and cooked up. This is one of the best meal planning tips that makes everything so easy.
Have One Tortilla Night
Whole-grain tortillas can make many great meals. You can add cheese and refried beans to them. You can add meat, cheese and vegetables to them. You can even make a fruit tortilla. There are numerous recipes you can make with tortillas. You can even use leftovers and put them onto a tortilla of another spin on that meal. You can pick out one night a week where you have tortilla night. You can either plan tortillas ahead of time or take whatever you have in the fridge and let people add their own ingredients to their tortilla.
Make it Fun
When meal planning, another way you will stick with it is if you make it fun. You can have a blast with meal planning. You may want to search online for some tasty and new recipes. Maybe you want to try something foreign or even put a twist on an old recipe. You can even look up child-friendly recipes to make it even more fun.
These are some of the tips you can use to make meal planning a lot more simple and fun. You may have been daunted by the task of meal planning before but now it is going to be easy. It might still seem a bit difficult at first but you just need to make it a habit. You need to get used to it and soon it will just be something that is part of your week.
