Monthly Meal Planning in Under an Hour

I used to have the dreaded “What do you want for dinner this week?” conversation with my husband on a weekly basis. Occasionally, he would throw out an idea, but most of the time, he said he didn’t care. This would infuriate me because it just meant I had to put in the mental work to choose the meals.

When I found a free minute, I would sit down with my notebook and search my exhausted brain for dinner ideas. Sometimes I would hop on Pinterest, only to end up going down a black hole and pinning new hairstyles to my Pinterest boards…eventually, I would decide on the same things we always had. So boring.

I knew that if I didn’t have to recreate meal planning each week, it wouldn’t be such a dreaded task. I would also save time, and putting together my grocery list would be a lot easier. Luckily, I figured out a system to meal plan for the entire month in under an hour.

I’m sharing this system with you because I don’t know anyone who enjoys meal planning. So if I can help you go through this process once a month instead of weekly or daily, you’ll have more time. Plus, you won’t have to deal with the dreadful task of deciding what your family will eat over the next week.

You may be thinking that planning for a month sounds really overwhelming. But it’s not. I’m going to walk you through it step by step and share with you how to organize and plan your meals so your brain doesn’t have to exert too much energy!

Benefits of Meal Planning

Before we get into the system for monthly meal planning, let’s talk about the benefits of planning meals for your family ahead of time.

When you have a plan for your meals, you avoid wasting time trying to figure out what’s for dinner. You just look at what you have planned for the day and start preparing.
You go to the grocery store with a purpose and only buy items you need. I shop on a weekly basis and for the most part, I only buy food that corresponds with what we will be eating that week. This eliminates wasted produce and other foods that spoil if not used quickly.
You save money because you’re only buying ingredients you need for the week, and you’re eating at home. Don’t even get me started on how expensive fast food is!
You eat healthier because you’re cooking at home and making intentional choices with your food, versus going out to eat.

Items You’ll Need for Monthly Meal Planning

Now that you know the benefits, you should be that much more motivated to give monthly meal planning a try, so let’s get started.

Before you sit down to plan, you’ll need the following items:

Cookbooks – gather your favorite cookbooks.

List of Favorite Meals – if you haven’t done so, put a simple list together of your family’s favorite meals. You can use this list to help if you’d lik e.

Bring up Pinterest or any other platform that you use to save recipes.

Calendar of Events – you’ll use this to decipher days you need meals and days you don’t.

Calendar to Record Meals – this can be the same as the Calendar of Events. I use my Google Calendar for both.

Monthly Meal Planning Routine

Now I’ll walk you through my monthly meal planning routine. I use a Google task as a reminder to do my monthly meal planning at the end of every month. For example, on November 27^th, the task pops up and reminds me to plan for next month. I have this as a reoccurring monthly task.

A little disclaimer here…I only plan for dinners. As a family, we have the same things for breakfast on rotation (cereal, eggs, waffles), so these items are added to the grocery list weekly. As far as lunch goes, my husband usually has a salad with chicken or he buys lunch, my older son has lunch at school, and my younger son and I have the same thing for lunch every day (for him, ham and cheese on a Hawaiian Roll, and for me, a salad). Therefore, there’s no need for creativity for these meals.

Ok, moving on to the routine:

Step #1 – Gather my cookbooks, Favorite Meals list, and computer.

Step #2 – Using my calendar, I mark off the days that I won’t need a meal (ie – dinner out, vacation, holiday, etc.). I create a Google event to record the meals, or the reason we won’t need a meal. I add it as an “All Day” event so it stays at the top of my day, and color code it brown so it sticks out from my tasks. Once you add in the days you won’t need a meal, you should feel a little less overwhelmed because you have less days to plan for.

Step #3 – Decide if you want to have one day a week for takeout, leftovers, and/or frozen pizza (we do frozen pizza every Friday). If so, add it to the calendar.

Step #4 – Now’s the time to start looking through your cookbooks and coming up with ideas for meals.

Here are my go-to cookbooks. They’ve made my life so much easier:

Binder of Favorites – this really isn’t a cookbook, but more of a collection of printed recipes I’ve put together through the years. This has our favorite meatball recipe, as well as some other family favorites.

Jordan Page’s A Season of Family Meal Plans: I self-gifted these last year for Christmas and I have no regrets. This has made monthly meal planning a no-brainer. In these cookbooks, you literally have dinners planned for 4 days out of 7, for every week of the year. I LOVE these cookbooks and cannot recommend them enough (if you have a family with no dietary restrictions).

Fix It and Forget-It Cookbook – I use our crockpot at least once a week. With kids in multiple evening sports, throwing something in the crockpot is the only way to make sure we have a warm dinner. I’ve used this cookbook so much the pages are falling out.

Shelf-Cooking 101 – This is another Jordan Page cookbook, my first introduction into her cookbooks. This cookbook also has some of our family favorites, like macaroni and cheese and chicken pot pie.

Step #5 – Fill in any empty days with your family’s favorite meal and now you have a month’s worth of meals planned out!

And guess what? You can use this monthly meal plan every month if you want! Just modify it a little depending on your plans.

Weekly Meal Planning Routine

With my monthly meal planning complete, weekly meal planning and grocery shopping is super simple.

This is my weekly meal planning/grocery shopping routine:

Look at my monthly meal plan and record meals for the current week into my notebook (this is where I keep my grocery lists).

Gather any cookbooks I will be using to make the meals so I can see what ingredients I need.

Add ingredients that I need into my grocery list.

For a more thorough look inside my grocery routine, check out this post.