It will be easy to skip the drive-thru and cook at home when you plan meals you love. Build a favorite meals list to make the meal planning, shopping, and kitchen prep easier!
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There’s no shortage of cheap dinner ideas out there, but the best meal ideas are the ones you want to eat. It’s true. If you don’t like it or simply don’t want to eat it, it won’t go very far to save you money.
The Good Cheap Eats System is designed to increase your grocery savings while also limiting food waste. One way to do this is to make sure that you plan your favorite meals for dinner.
Keeping a list of 10-12 of your favorite meals make meal planning so much easier!
Why Do This
You’ll save time. When you make a favorite meals list, planning your meals will be quick and easy. No more wracking your brain for ideas!
You’ll save money. With a list of your favorite meals at hand, you can easily calculate the food cost of each and keep tabs on which ingredients to stock. With your own budget grocery list on hand, you’ll be able to make good use of sales.
You’ll avoid decision fatigue. Knowing what recipes your family loves, means that you won’t be testing recipes on them all the time. You can dial in that delicious chicken pasta with goat cheese or make that favorite meat sauce on a regular rotation, knowing everyone will be happy.
How to Make a Favorite Meals List
Figuring out how to mesh your own food preferences with those of the picky eaters in your family can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.
This may be an easy exercise. Just ask your people what are their favorite meals. Perhaps everyone says basically the same things and you go on your merry way.
However, if it doesn’t appear to be easy, here are some strategies to help build your catalog of go-to, favorite meals.
1. Write down your meal plans.
Keep a record of what you eat for several weeks. Just write down what you have for dinner and whether or not everyone liked it.
Make whatever notes you’ll need to remember if that meal was a hit or not. You can download this calendar to keep a record for the next month.
Write down every dinner that you actually eat. You’re going to refer back to it later. Add a star or happy face if the meal was a success. It it was a total disaster, mark that, too.
If you can, add a little note about what was on your schedule that day. Was this a soccer practice night? Would the meal have worked better on a different night, just not a night when you had a lot going on?
Our eating habits are effected by our lives, so our favorite meals will reflect that season of life.
2. Determine your goals.
Ask yourself, “What are our meal planning goals? What’s most important in how we eat?”
It might be that you want to stay under your grocery budget, keep to certain culinary standards, eat healthfully and unprocessed, or a combination of them all. You might be pressed for time and need meals on the go in addition to the above.
You might have a myriad of goals. Identify what they are so that your favorite meals list will help you reach those goals.
What if a favorite meal, like steak and lobster, is counter to your savings goal? It can still be a favorite, but maybe not one to put in your regular meal plan rotation.
3. Analyze your habits and preferences.
Consider the following questions so that you can look at your family’s habits more objectively.
- What do you like to eat?
- What goes to waste and why?
- What prevents you from meeting your food goals? Is it poor planning, crazy schedules, or something else?
- What makes a meal a success? What signifies a train wreck?
We want this core list of favorite meals to be easy to make, well-liked by everyone in the family, and supportive of your overall goals.
4. Put your favorite meals list to good use!
If you don’t already have some kind of household planner, you might want to create a small meal planning notebook. Stash your favorite meals list here along with printouts of the recipes so that it’s easily accessible to everyone in the household.
Prefer to go digital, store your list in your favorite app and manage the share settings that way.
Once you’ve got your go-to list of favorite meals, you can
- Price each recipe out so you know how they rank in terms of expense. Plan the cheaper meals more often to stretch your grocery budget farther.
- Create a budget grocery list so that you can easily keep track of what you need and buy extras when you’re shopping the sales and clearance.
- Plan your favorite meals in a weekly rotation so that you can enjoy them often and make homecooking more of a habit.
Remember that you can add to and subtract recipes from this favorite meals list as your tastes and season of life change.
Meal Planning Tips
What do you think?
Let’s chat in the comments!
This post was originally published on August 19, 2012. It has been updated for content and clarity.
Rebecca Cleveland
I stumbled across your site and I’m really enjoying working my way thru it. I’m new to meal planning but I’m determined to give it a go and stop wasting time, money and food. Does anyone have a tried and true plan for on the go meals? Several nights a week, the kids have activities late afternoon/early evening and there is not enough time to go home from school before having to immediately turn around and go back to town for the activity. We live a ways out so, too often, time doesn’t permit a return trip home. However, everyone needs to eat in between time or we have quite the “hangry” group. Any suggestions would be so appreciated!
Jessica Fisher
This post might be helpful: https://lifeasmom.com/how-to-save-money-on-food-costs-when-life-is-crazy/
Marla
Ive been meal planning for a long time, yet I never thought to track what goes to waste. Brilliant idea! Thank you so much.
tina
I just found out that I have type 2 diabetes, and have to eat healthy, and teach my children to do the same so they don’t have to worry about getting diabetes also. I really need to learn how to plan healthy meals, so any info I can get will help me out alot.
Helena
What good timing! I have been mulling over meal planning to make my life as a mom easier. I feel like I cook all day and don’t get much else done! But food is very important in our house and healthy, mindful eating is our aim. I just don’t know if I am a planner at heart, I like to pick and choose depending on the mood of the day….
Gen
@Helena, hey, u don,t need to ba super strict with the meal plan…I pick 5 meals and don’t assign theem to days…that way I can cook what stricks my fancy that day or depending on what going on…I can cook the more elaborate ones or the easier ones;)
Deb
Oh, this is great timing! My #1 goal has always been healthy meals. Now we’re moving into a season where our grocery budget really needs to crunch down, so I need to figure out how to make that work while still serving healthy food. We’ve never had a strict food budget before and I’m struggling!
Christina S
My main goals are to get us back on a schedule, back on budget, and to not waste as much food as we have this summer. Our summer has been crazy and we have eaten out way more than we should have. My goal for eating out is no more than once every week or two.
Caroline
Thanks for this series, Jessica.
Our main goals: stick to a strict budget, reduce processed foods/increase real and whole foods, eat more organic produce (especially avoiding the “dirty dozen” to hopefully help with my son’s special needs), and choose fairly quick meals to fix (and that I can fix with the kids around, too!).
M
This couldn’t have come at a better time. With our oldest starting school this year and my work schedule growing busier, I’m needing to look closer at the balance of time, budget, and quality. I like looking at what’s going on in correlation to what’s being served. I think it’s also important to look at the bigger picture of a week as well. When I have a “down weekend”, I am better prepared to handle a busy week than when we’ve been gone and I haven’t had as much prep time.
Steph
I highly recommend adding a little bit about what you had going that day when you’re tracking your meals. The hardest lesson I learned when I started meal planning was that there are some nights when all I’m going to have time for is something extremely fast. It was difficult to accept but a frozen pizza is still better than takeout and sometimes that’s just what you have to do. Now that I’m over it, meal planning is less stressful.
Jessica
@Steph, that is a brilliant idea. Every day is different and so the meal that works for hockey night might not be that much fun on a kick-back relax night. Off to edit the post.