When you are making a weekly meal plan, the goal usually is to make your life easier. You would want to save time and stress of having to plan out each meal and then prepare for it. If you are a working parent, then this becomes even more important, so that you can make sure that your family is being fed proper nutritional food, while not driving you crazy.
To begin with, start out by planning meals for the entire week, including snacks and all three meals. Try to include all the meals that your family either enjoys together or takes with them in their tiffins.
Having all the meals listed down will give you an idea of what dishes you can prepare for each day. You can repeat the dishes with a gap of a few days to give your family a variety of dishes for the week.
Remember to take into account the days when you are busy and you won’t have much time, this lets you plan easy and quick dishes for those particular days. Use your work schedule to guide your meal planning as well.
If you find this overwhelming, you can start out by doing this for just one meal. Say, you plan out dinners for the whole week. After you come back from work, tired and wanting to do nothing but rest, you won’t have to cook a whole meal. You can quickly throw everything you prepared together, and have a nice, healthy meal that would otherwise have needed at least an hour to make.
One thing to keep in mind is to be mindful of your lunch and dinner dishes. When planning for lunch, plan something that you can grab and go because you usually have shorter hours for lunch and most of us take tiffins. The chances of having a microwave in your establishment are 50-50 so don’t rely on that.
On the other end, you will have more time for dinner. So you can plan dishes for which you can make preparations at the weekend and then when it is time for cooking the meal, all you have to do is put it all together. It will give you the feeling of cooking a healthy meal without putting a lot of effort each time.
Final Thoughts
Don’t be overwhelmed by the idea of preparing for a week’s worth of meals in a day or two. Try by starting with a single meal plan. After you get used to planning and preparing and executing one meal, you can then upgrade the skill and apply it to all the meals.
