Meal Planning Organization

Weeknights are hectic. You have to get out of work at a decent time, pick up the kids from their after school activities, and then get home to make dinner. How many times have you gotten home only to find that you have no idea what to make or that you don’t have any food in the house? Enter the pizza delivery guy. Thankfully, with a little organization, weeknight dinners can be stress-free.

The trick is to plan ahead with a weekly meal planner displayed prominently in your kitchen. Creating your own meal planner is fun, easy and can be customized to match your home décor. Start with a piece of poster board in the color of your choosing. Log on to iClickn’Print and begin designing your meal planner. A good way to start is by dividing your project into five or seven parts depending on whether you are going to include weekend meals. You can do this by drawing lines or inserting a different symbol for each day of the week. Add clip art, shapes and text to make the planner your own. Print your project and affix it to your poster board.

The next step is creating “dinner cards.” Each of these cards will have the name of a different meal that you know how to prepare. A great way to create these is to use business card paper, add food-related clipart and the name of a meal.

Now you have to decide how you are going to hold your meal cards on your meal planner. You will need to create a “pouch” to hold all of the meal cards that aren’t being used for the current week. This can be as simple as gluing a square of construction paper to the front of your meal planner. Then you need to add a clip to each day of the week. We like to use clothespins for this. Glue a clothespin to each day of the week and you’re done!

Every weekend, go through your meal cards and decide which meals you are going to make for the week. Clip the meal cards to the corresponding day, make a shopping list and get prepared. You will have everything you need on hand to make fresh home-cooked meals and your prominently displayed meal planner will keep the family from asking the dreaded “What’s for dinner?”