meal planning – The Bone Broth Cook

Eat Better With Meal Planning

Meal planning can help a family with many things, such as a busy schedule, a small budget, and even dietary concerns. Plus, having regular family meals together, at the table, is an important aspect of bonding. Studies show that teenagers, especially, who eat at the table as often as possible with their parents get better grades and are less affected by peer pressure. Knowing all this, it’s obvious that meal planning is helpful on many fronts. Planning meals doesn’t have to be hard. Today, there are a variety of online tools to help you. Of course, you can still do it the old fashioned way, with paper, a calendar and your favorite cookbook. However, if you want to use one of the fabulous online tools to help with menu planning it will cut your planning time, and probably increase the range of foods your family eats from week to week. A really useful tool is found at allrecipes.com. You can search for recipes for free, or you can pay a low membership fee to use all the meal planning features, including phone apps and more. If you prefer a more hands off approach, letting someone else pick the recipes for you, try savingdinner.com for done for you menus. The creator of this site has many tried and tested cookbooks of her own. When you plan your menus do so with full knowledge of your schedule for the week. Get out the calendar and check to see where you will be, where the kids will be, and where your spouse will be. If it’s an especially busy week, you’ll want to plan to cook ahead (freezer cooking), or find 30 minute one pan meals that are nutritious and tasty so that you don’t fall off the menu wagon. If you make it too difficult for yourself it’ll be hard to stick to, and you’ll find that you waste food, upping your over all food bill instead of lowering it. The thing about preparing home cooked meals, whether one pan meals, freezer meals or even ethnic dishes, you control the ingredients. You can adjust any recipe to fit your family’s nutritional needs and dietary requirements. Plus, as long as you steer clear of processed “fake” foods, you’ll ingest less saturated fats, less processed sugars, less chemicals, less hormones, less additives, and you will experience a much healthier lifestyle than if you keep eating out just because you’re busy or unprepared. For anything you do in life, having a plan helps, and that includes planning menus for your family. You don’t go on a trip without mapping out how to get there, or at least enter the information into your Garmin, why would you trust something as important as your family’s nutrition and health to last minute fast food runs? The great thing is, if you make this a regular part of your life, getting other members of the family to help out, all of you will soon look forward to stress free family meals at the dinner table more than the drive through.

Meal Planning Cuts Down On Stress

We all have super busy lives today. We’re running to work, driving children to lessons, helping with homework, volunteering for causes, and trying to fit in some fun too, here and there. We’re sleep deprived, and unfortunately, most of us are also stressed out, overweight and under nourished. The best way to combat these issues is to start menu planning. Menu planning involves creating a weekly menu and grocery list before going to the market. Doing so helps avoid impulse purchases and running out of something important while you’re trying to cook dinner. By learning about meal planning you’ll actually gain more time in your day, eliminate the last minute fast food runs, and teach healthy eating habits. Writing down your daily meals and then viewing the week all at once will give you a chance to see where nutrition is missing in your family’s diet. You’ll be able to see where you can cut back, and where you can add more nutritious options. With today’s computer applications, meal planning can also be a fun activity. If you are stressed out about your food budget, meal planning can save you from that too. Some online apps like ZipList.com, allow you to compare items to weekly sales in your area, helping you save more money. Even if you don’t use an app like that, by planning your weekly meals, then creating a shopping list before going shopping you will eliminate impulse purchases thus, cutting down on your food bill. With proper planning, you can make even the smallest food budget work. Meal planning can help you see what type of nutrition you and your family is missing too. If you look at the overall plan and see more hotdogs and chips than fish and broccoli, you may want to take another stab at the meal planning before creating your shopping list. By using nutritional information found on recipe sites such as Allrecipes.com you can ensure that your family is getting the nutrition they need. It can be challenging to consider each individual’s needs, but the apps help a lot. There are meal planning applications for every desire. If you want to create your own menus and recipes you can do that with a program like BigOven.com. If you’d rather use someone else’s tried and true menu, like SavingDinner.com, you can do that too. Your options are not limited in any way by dietary considerations either. With many online apps you can enter desired ingredients, or eliminate various ingredients too, for the perfect recipe search for your menus. It doesn’t matter if you’re a meat eater or a vegan, or somewhere in between, you can plan affordable healthy meals easily with online applications, cutting down on stress exponentially.

Save Time With Meal Planning

To some people sitting down to plan meals might seem like something that causes you to spend more time, than less time. But, the truth is, by planning meals, you’ll save time shopping, and you’ll be ready each day when it’s time for dinner instead of running through a drive through. The drive through isn’t really as fast as you think it is. First, you have to go out of the house each day, drive there, then wait for it, then drive back and hand it to everyone. Plus, you and I both know that fast food is not actually food. No amount of assurances are going to ever make fast food a truly healthy choice, therefore, you might as well save time (and money) planning meals. If you’re not sure where to start, try starting on a recipe site like AllRecipes.com. You can use it free for basic features, but if you want to do real meal planning pay the upgrade fee which is quite low for what is offered. There you can find recipes, move them over to your menu, then export into a printable shopping list. They also have mobile apps so that you can avoid printing, if you desire. Plus, you could make your menu and shopping list while waiting in a doctor’s office. Having a list to shop from at the store also saves time. You’ll be able to move through the store faster knowing exactly what you’re going to buy, avoiding the impulse purchases that can plague you when you have no idea what you need. Many apps provide shopping lists in the typical order of a grocery store so that you can find your items faster. Whether using an app, or a paper list, you won’t forget what you need, so you won’t need to make a return trip. This saves you both time and money. When you are ready to prepare meals, you’ll simply look on your menu planner, checking the date the night before to see if you need to thaw anything. Then, in the morning you can pop your food into the crock pot if it’s a longer cooking meal, or get as much ready for dinner time as possible. Be sure to enlist the help of teenagers and spouses, because there is no reason why, especially if you work outside the home, that you should do all the work involved in preparing meals for the family. If everyone chips in, they’ll actually enjoy the meal more anyway. As you can see menu planning saves a lot of time in your day. No more wondering on your way home from work what you’re going to feed the family, no more trips in the fast food line, or last minute store runs. All, time savers alone, but put together could literally add hours to your week. Hours you can use doing something fun, like reading, or pinning your favorite meals on Pinterest.