Our favorite meal-planning helps from around the web

January seems to summon new strength for organizational goals, including our meal-planning efforts.  We’ve been busy browsing Pinterest for printable calendars and planner pages for our own home organization, and thought we’d share some of our favorites.  Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite resources from around the web for planning and prepping meals to make dinnertime easier. We’ve also included our own printable Monthly Meal Planner as an option for you.

Meal Planning Made Easier

Deciding “what’s for dinner” while you’re eating breakfast can save a lot of frustration at 5:00 p.m..  You can start a meal in the slow cooker or chop and prep ingredients for cooking a meal later.  The act of deciding what to feed the family is often the biggest hurdle, so planning ahead makes cooking much more enjoyable. Depending on your family’s routines and budget, you can plan meals for a week, two weeks, or a month, and organize a meal plan in a short period of time.  If you need some recipe inspiration, here are a few blogs we love for family-friendly fare (and they happen to be friends of ours who have presented at our previous food shows):

Favorite Family Recipes: Alison’s Pantry Food Show guests loved hearing from Echo Blickenstaff, one of this site’s bloggers, at our show last year. As their blog title suggests, it’s a wealth of recipes and video tutorials for dishes families will want to enjoy again and again.

Six Sisters Stuff: Alison’s Pantry and Six Sisters share a common goal of bringing families together around great food.  We love their easy-to-search site, and wide variety of recipe options for any diet preference. They also offer a reasonably-priced menu plan service, if you just don’t want to think about finding the recipes yourself!

The Food Nanny: The Food Nanny simplifies dinnertime by assigning a theme for each night of the week.  Why didn’t we think of that before?! We don’t know, but we love her “yummy, easy family meals” as she calls them. Her book, The Food Nanny Rescues Dinner, is full of great recipes and worth the purchase.

Printable Meal Planners

Once you find some recipes your family will eat, the next step is simply deciding when to serve them.  If Wednesday nights are busy, schedule a slow-cooker meal in your planner. If the family will all be home for Sunday dinner, plan something that will feed a crowd.  A printable meal-planner keeps it all together and gets all the planning completed in advance, which makes actually cooking and serving the meal quicker and more enjoyable.

Plan a week of meals:

Strawberry Mommy Cakes  offers an editable meal-planner that also helps you track water intake and servings for each food group. for a meal-planner and grocery list in one. She also has a great Monthly Meal Planner.

 

Or, you can download our free Alison’s Pantry printable weekly meal planner by clicking on the image below:

 

Plan two weeks of meals:

This cleverly-designed two-week meal planner from Keys to Inspiration includes a thoughtful clip-and-carry grocery list portion. You can plan your menu at the top of the page, and then cut off the grocery list to place your Alison’s Pantry order or run to the store.

 

Plan a month of meals:

The Cottage Market offers weekly and monthly calendars in a cute set of 5 coordinating printables to catalog your favorite recipes too.

Or, you can also download our Alison’s Pantry Monthly Meal Planner by clicking below.

 

 

 

Now you just need the ingredients!  Click over to our website to start shopping. Grocery shopping with Alison’s Pantry offers the savings of bulk cases and the quality of foodservice products, plus it works perfectly for meal-planners because you can shop for all the core recipe ingredients just once a month.

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