Tips To Kick Weekly Meal Planning Up A Notch

Check Grocery Store Flyers

If you want to stay on a budget when it comes to meal planning, or are genuinely stuck for ideas, checking out flyers from the grocery stores in your city is perhaps the best option for you. You may be able to get them in the mail, but most grocery stores also make their flyers available online. In any case, read through the flyers to see what products are on sale that week. Is ground beef on sale? Dive into your recipes to see what meals you can make with this. Good standbys for ground beef include meatloaf, pasta sauce, meatballs, and tacos. Is chicken on sale? Work dishes like chicken wings, chicken fried rice, baked chicken breast, and chicken noodle soup into your meal plan.

Create A Calendar Or Schedule

Even if you take all of the previous tips into account, the backbone of any good meal plan with variety is to have an actual calendar, digital or on paper, to show the meals planned for particular days. Without a calendar or another type of schedule that indicates what meals you have planned, you may find you are liable to forget the meals, meaning you might not do the right meal preparation such as chopping vegetables or defrosting meat.

While sticking to the calendar is ideal, you should feel free to switch up your schedule if circumstances dictate it. A prime example of this is craving the pizza you had planned for Friday on another day, such as Wednesday. There is no reason why you should not simply switch what you had planned for Wednesday with the pizza on Friday, so long as you are prepared to put in any extra effort needed.