Meal Plan AND Write Your Grocery List in 5 Minutes

Grocery shopping in the winter is probably one of my top 5 least favorite things. It's disgustingly cold and/or snowy, windy, rainy, wet, and awful outside, everyone around you is sick, and something about the early nightfall and constant chilled-to-your-bones makes allll the unhealthy food even more appealing despite having made all those awesome resolutions to eat better. It's just a recipe for disaster.

BUT - it doesn't have to be a huge undertaking. I have found a way to meal plan AND prep a grocery list in 5 minutes or less, and when I've got my list in hand, grocery shopping can be done in a half hour and I'm much less likely to throw a bunch of unnecessary and unneeded things in my cart (I'm looking at YOU , Dunford Donuts).

Here's how it works.

Start with the fridge - take a quick look and mentally take stock of the basics. Eggs, milk, produce. Then look in the freezer and do the same - meats, frozen veggies. Move to the pantry - kid snacks, bread, baking essentials.

Once you've done that, on your paper write down a letter for each day of the week and next to it the meal (or destination) for that day. It looks like this:

M - neighbors

T - sausage/veggie bake

W - sweet potato burgers

T - chicken + veggies

F - g.f. pasta

S - fajita bowls

S - dinner with Jeff's parents

Then, decide what you want for breakfasts that week. Lately we've been having breakfast sandwiches for Jeff, and sausage + muffins for the boys and myself which I pre-make on Mondays so we can grab and reheat first thing in the morning. It's easy and saves tons of time!

We have a list of probably 14-15 mieals that we rotate through, and less than that lately as we're on a New Years Diet kick like the rest of the world, so we need to find a few more to throw in the mix to keep our dinners from getting boring. In any case, having a go-to menu makes it easy to plan food for the week and unless you feel the need to be creative in the kitchen every night, it makes grocery shopping a cinch too.

After writing your meals, make the following columns on the paper: Meat, Dairy, Produce, Other.  You can get more specific but I find that these four categories are enough for me. I go down through the menu list and first add to the list the meats that I don't have that will be needed for the meals. Then, the same for dairy. Then produce.... then other. You get the idea.

After I've written all the foods we'll need, I add everything else to the "other" column - household essentials, medications, baby items.

That's it! Your meal planning and grocery shopping list is done. After that, you can add the meals to your planner/calendar so you remember what you've got available for the week. 

I hope this helps you save some time this week!