Meal planning, including keto meal planning, can help you answer that question that’s on your family’s mind….. What’s for dinner?
What is Keto meal planning?
Meal planning is whatever system you use to plan your meals whether it is for the day, a week or even longer.
While this sounds simple it often involves several steps. These include deciding what you want to make, gathering recipes to make it, figuring out if you have the needed ingredients, shopping for ingredients that you need and finally preparing the meal.
It sounds like it’s a lot of work which is why many people struggle to get a system that works for them in place. In the end they turn to fast food, take out and frozen meals to fill in the meal gaps when they find they don’t have time to make something.
In reality, meal planning doesn’t have to be complicated and can be quickly done once a little bit of effort is initially put in. Meal planning can save you both time and money. If you’re on the keto diet it can also help you to avoid those last minute meal choices that often are high in carbs.
We all might meal plan in slightly different ways but we still all follow three key steps:
- Selecting recipes
- Shopping for ingredients
- Preparing the meals
To come up with your own personal meal planning system let’s dig a little deeper into each of these key steps. In the end, the goal is to find a system that is effective without making you crazy.
Selecting recipes for your meal plan
You already know what you like to eat. Perhaps you have been collecting recipes online using something such as Pinterest, or even by saving links to the website pages with your favorite recipes.
Maybe you have cookbooks with recipes that you already use or would like to try. You probably even have favorite dishes that you already like to make and might not even need a recipe to make them.
The first part of meal planning is deciding which meals you want to plan for and for how many days.
Sometimes the meal plan is easy: toast, cereal or a muffin for breakfast each morning. Lunch is a sandwich or leftovers. But you need to plan and cook dinner each night.
Sometimes the meal plan is a little more complex and you need to cook and prepare more than 1 meal each day that are not simply grab and go types of meals.
The first step is to decide how many meals, and which ones, will you be planning.
Second step is to decide on the number of days for your meal plan.
Some people only plan meals for 2 or 3 days at a time. Others plan one week at a time. Some people even plan multiple weeks or even a month’s worth of meals!
On a piece of paper or, even in a document file on your phone, write down which meals you are planning and for how many days. Let’s make this easy and focus on a week worth of dinners. Stop and think about how much time you will have to prepare these meals. Will you be getting home late after a long day at work and perhaps running kids around to various after school activities? Are there some days when a crockpot meal would be better than having to come in and cook?
Now that you know how many meals to plan and what type of meal you might need (fast and easy, crockpot, sandwich, etc) it’s time to pick your recipes!
I love Pinterest for gathering new recipe ideas and saving them. I’ve got a variety of boards set up to sort them into categories which makes it easier to find what I need.
I also have favorite cookbook recipes and even favorite family meals that have no written recipe.
To make it easier to use my favorite recipes I use an amazing board system to coordinate them all. It’s called Trello. It’s free to sign up and it allows me to keep all the recipes I use and love as well as those that I would like to try in one easy to find location.
If you’re interested in using Trello I have a free keto meal planning board that can help you. You might also be interested in this Trello meal planning course.
Bonus points for the fact that it helps me to easily create a shopping list for ingredients from recipes AND I can access my Trello board from my phone. For more information about meal planning with Trello check out this meal planning page.
Look through your recipes and pick those that you would like to make for the coming week.
On Pinterest: try creating a private board to pin copies of the recipes you are interested in making so you can quickly find them.
On Trello: you can create a card for that recipe. Once I’ve added in the information that I need for the recipe it’s easy enough to copy it to my meal plan calendar.
On paper or on a phone document: write down your recipe name, where it can be found, and the ingredients needed.
Shopping For Ingredients
Now that you know how many meals you need to make and have gathered your recipes now it’s time to build a shopping list.
Start by making an ingredients list. Record all the ingredients and amounts needed for the recipes you want to make. As you go along you can consolidate amounts when similar items are used in two or more recipes.
Once you have an ingredient list made you can build your grocery list. This is the list of items that you will need to purchase to make your planned meals. Look through your cabinets, refrigerator and freezer to see what items you currently have on hand. Doing this helps you to save money as you won’t be purchasing duplicate items.
Usually when I make my grocery list I try to group the items together as I would find them in my local grocery store. All the produce is listed together. All the freezer items together. If you’re going to the same grocery store often enough you might even remember which items are found in the same area together. For example: all the pasta related items can be found together….pasta, spaghetti sauce, grated Parmesan cheese, etc. Grouping items together keeps you from having to double back for items that were forgotten.
Preparing The Meals
The final step in meal planning is the actual meal preparation. You can help to save yourself some time when it comes to making your meals be investing in a little time to prep some items.
Once you’ve bought your groceries for the meal planning period take a look to see if there are any items that can be prepped to help save you time on the actual meal plan day. Here are some examples:
- Wash all your produce at one time.
- Dice all your onions needed for the week.
- Chop any vegetables needed for other dishes.
- Put your beef, chicken or pork marinating.
Now put your meal plan into action!
Meal planning isn’t difficult but it does take a bit to discover what works for you. There’s a little bit of work that is done in the beginning but, in the long run, it can easily pay off but helping you to save time, money and your sanity.
Every time you go through the process of meal planning you figure out what works best for you and where you need to tweak it. You quickly discover where you can make changes and which recipes are the perfect recipes for you and your family.
Don’t give up. Each time you meal plan your planning skills get better and the time it takes to do it shortens.
Meal Planning Steps In Action
As people have asked how I meal plan I thought I would give you a brief rundown of my own meal planning system. I meal plan each week and have for a while now (a couple of years so far). Life is busy and I like to be prepared so we don’t over spend by turning to take out or fast food for meals. Plus it helps keep me on track with keto.
I don’t plan breakfasts except to make sure that I keep some staples on hand for making meals….eggs, sausage patties, bacon and, for the non keto household members, waffles, cereal, bread and bagels.
For lunches I keep a selection of sandwich meat and a few frozen pizzas on hand for quick meals for the non keto folks. For me I make sure to have salad ingredients and fill in the gaps with leftovers.
My main focus is putting dinner on the table each night with enough left over to become lunch for later in the week. These are my main goals with planning.
My meal planning begins on Saturday. I look at my schedule for the week to see which days might need a fast meal or perhaps a crockpot meal. I pick a few easy meals and several that might involve a little more time for cooking.
I look to see what meat is on sale this week. Meat is one of the most expensive items on my grocery list and I like to plan meals around sales if possible. My recipe choices are often based on these items. Total time involved about 5 minutes.
I take a quick look through Pinterest for any new recipes that I have recently saved. I copy the recipes I’m interested in to a section of my Trello board. I also add any recipes currently on my Trello board that I will be using for my meal plan to the meal plan list. I add the ingredients into one main list. Total time involved 10 minutes. Can be up to 30 minutes if I fall down the Pinterest rabbit hole and start looking at other things.
Next I build my grocery list from the ingredients list. Total time involved 5 to 15 minutes depending on how much looking through cabinets I end up doing.
Sunday morning is grocery shopping day. Once the groceries are home I quickly prep some of the items for the coming week. Often this means prepping a big container of salad.
If my meal plan includes things such as homemade dressings or marinades I put those together as well. I also wash all the produce at one time.
If there are diced vegetables being used in recipes then, depending upon what they are, I will dice them up and put them in a storage bag so they are ready to be quickly used later in the week.
Total time involved in putting away groceries (not including shopping as I’m usually running a variety of errands at the same time) and doing some meal prep is approximately an hour.
Now I’m ready for meals during the remainder of the week.
If you struggle with meal planning then this meal planning course might be just what you need.
Stop staring into your refrigerator hoping that dinner inspiration will suddenly hit you.
Got a favorite meal planning tip? Why not leave a comment below and share it.
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