The easiest way to organize your food requirements is to get in the house! Sound silly? Shouldn’t! But how often have you found yourself staring at an empty cupboard or a freezer round dinner time? You really do not have to find yourself at the checkout point at 5.30pm with hungry children.

Menu planning need only take a ½ hr per week and it brings so many benefits of health and peace in your home that the time spent here is rewarded triple fold.

Menu planning is not hard. I have broken it into some simple steps for you to follow:

Start with a menu planning template

Print out this free weekly template and shopping list or save them to a folder on your computer Click here to download the planner template. And here for the shopping list.

You will need Adobe Reader to open this file. You can get Adobe Reader here.

Now make that cup of tea or coffee and grab a pencil.

When you sit down with the template here are some things to consider:

• What will I feed everyone in between meals? If you only snack on fruit between meals, make sure you have a variety available. If you enjoy baked goods consider setting aside a day when you can bake snacks, crunchies (granola bars) or muffins to keep the “cookie jar” full. This is a job that I do with my youngest two every week.
• What will we do for breakfast and lunch? Plan your breakfast and lunches – hungry kids are grumpy kids! Alternate between choices and stay away from empty foodstuffs for breakfast like sugary cereals. If your children enjoy cereals consider making your own muesli. It is healthier and cheaper. Lunches will be determined by the amount of time you have available. Sandwiches, while quick and easy, are high on the GI scale and do not sustain children for afternoon sports.
• How will I cater for everyone preferences? Make sure everyone has a say in the meals. This does not mean you have to compromise on healthy eating standards and only eat kid’s favorites. But each child in our family gets to choose one meal per week and often they will surprise me with healthy choices. We also have one fun food night, normally a Friday, for pizza or hamburgers.
• How can I include our schooling themes? This is the fun part of menu planning! Planning your meals enables you to fit in authentic dishes related to your history or cultural studies that you are covering with your children. Sonlight curriculum even developed a theme based cookbook for this purpose which fits in with each of their core years. For instance, in our home, when we were doing our Islamic studies we had a week of Islamic meals.
• Which evenings will I be out late? Plan your evening meals around your afternoon activities for example: If you are going to be out late, set a soup to cook in a slow cooker (or crock-pot) or have a quick meal all ready to throw together when you walk in. Make sure you have done as much of the preparation before you leave if you are not using a crock-pot.
• How much help do I need for this meal? Make sure on the evenings that you do not need to rush, that you get your children to help prepare meals with you. This is a valuable lifekskill that they will use for the rest of their days. When you do your menu plan allocate a child to be your helper. This can be done for all meals and even children as young as 3 can help at dinner time. Our 4 year old son enjoys taking the seeds out of gem squash and cutting cucumber for our salads.
• What new meals would I like to try? Plan those special or more involved meals on a weekend when you have time to prepare them. I buy two magazines each month because I have found that they have great recipes in them. These I schedule for weekends when I need to read and follow recipes. Recently I went on a Jamie Oliver binge and cooked our way through his books. I also love sushi...so that will soon be our Saturday night meals.
• How do I create the atmosphere around eating together? Make your mealtimes a celebration of being together as a family. Put a vase of flowers on the table. Get the children to set the table properly. Make this time at the end of your day a time to talk and catch up with each other no matter how old or young your children are.
• Bulk cooking is not one of my favorite things to do, although I did a lot of that when my children were babies. But neither I nor my husband liked reheats. A friend has very successfully implemented Frozen Assets : How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month by Deborah Taylor-Hough. This way she has a stock of freezer meals for each evening meal. The greatest benefit I can see with this is if you are ill, all your husband or older children have to do is haul out a meal and prepare a salad...Voila and dinner is served.
• Your husband’s lunch can easily be dealt with by you cooking just a little more than you need at dinner time and serving a portion straight into a lunch box. This means in the morning when you see him off to work, you can take out the lunch from the fridge and he has a healthy lunch ready to go. This saves a huge amount of money in our home.

Now that you have your plan write all the ingrediants on your shopping list. Your next job is to head of for the grocery store...so take a look at my grocery shopping tips to make that even a little more organized and enjoyable.

Maybe you don't have the time or would like to kick-start your menu planning with a little help...? Take a look at this fabulous menu planner entitled Menu in a Box 100 Day Meal Planning Kit Ruth has put together a wonderful array of recipes to use for your family. Her menu planning kit includes shopping lists, bonus menus for parties and special holidays. I have her kit and we have found every recipe we have tried to be delicious...even the kids say so!

Are you a beginner or a veteran crock-pot chef? Looking for some new inspiration for crock-pot meals? Take a look at Cally's site - Yummy Crockpot Recipes

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