Below is a free printable menu planning form where you can list your family's favorite dishes so when you're struggling with what to cook for the week you've got ideas.
This form is useful when you sit down to plan your weekly meals and draw a big blank of what to cook for the week.
If you're like me, sometimes when I'm meal planning I'm already pretty tired, and for some reason I can't remember all the meals my family likes to eat, and sometimes I end up making the same things week after week.
Even our family faves get old fast if we eat them all the time.
This is a way to jog your memory with more things everyone likes to eat, but that perhaps for whatever reason, you haven't made in a while and forgotten about.
It can make planning easier, and keep you from getting in a rut with what you cook all at once.
I've added a couple of columns so you can list main dishes, the favorite sides or desserts your family enjoys with the meal, and finally a column to jog your memory while making your grocery list of what you need to make sure you pick up at the store to cook everything, or look at this column and figure out family favorites that you can make with ingredients already on hand.
The ingredients column doesn't have to list staples, like salt and pepper, for example, but if you always need to buy a can of tomato sauce, for example, when you make the meal or side go ahead and write it down so you don't forget an essential ingredient when you go to the store.
Another idea for how to use this menu planning form is to let your kids read through the list and let them pick meals from it for you to cook.
This way they're more invested in the meal plan for the week, but you're working from a controlled list and not trying some strange new recipe on a busy night wondering if it will be a hit or a miss.
Click here to get your printable
(opens into a new window, as PDF)
Once you declutter one type of item in your home I bet you'll want to declutter some more. After all, decluttering gives you a great reward for even a small investment of time and energy.
The Declutter 365 system is designed to help you declutter, over the course of a year, your entire house, with just 15 minutes of decluttering each day!
Hundreds of thousands of people use this proven system to get rid of their clutter, and bring peace and calm back to their homes.
Declutter 365 works to guide you to clear the clutter without overwhelm, focusing on just one small area at a time, and without making a huge mess in the process, so you see consistent forward progress without all that "messy middle" that makes it even harder to function in your home than before you started.
In addition to building a daily decluttering habit, the Declutter 365 program, along with the accompanying 52 Week Organized Home Challenge, teaches you the skills, habits, routines, and mindsets necessary to maintain the clutter free and organized state of your home from now on, so it'll never be as messy and cluttered as it is right now, ever again.
If you haven't already, make sure to get your copy of this year's Declutter 365 annual calendar here (it's FREE!), find today's date, and do 15 minutes of decluttering on the day's mission. Then, repeat again tomorrow, and again and again. Over the course of the next year, if you do this 15 minutes per day, you'll declutter your whole house!
Right now you're decluttering your pantry and other food storage areas, and there's a lot of stuff to declutter in this space.
I've done the hard work of breaking down these tasks into smaller more manageable steps for you, so you don't get overwhelmed or worry you're forgetting a task, and you can go at the pace you want, whether that's fast or slow.
In addition, you can tackle these decluttering tasks in whatever order you want when you use these checklists!
Menu Planner Form + Grocery List |
Weekly Dinner Menu + Premade Grocery List Sample |
Printable Weekly Meal Planner Template |
If you struggle to make menu plans and would love for someone to make them for you, plus make a grocery list for you, it’s well worth spending a few dollars every week to let Eat at Home do the work for you.
Check out my review of the Eat at Home meal plans here, and why it's one of my favorite family meal planning services.
Do you have an Instant Pot hiding in your cabinet? Want to learn how to use it? Sign up for Instant Pot School! It's free, and it will help you put that time-saver to work!
Learn more about this free course, and why I'm recommending it in my article all about Instant Pot School.
Share Your Comments, Tips & Ideas
I would love to hear from you, sharing your thoughts, questions, or ideas about this topic, so leave me a comment below. I try to always respond back!