Have a cute, cookie(less) jar sitting around that you just can’t bring yourself to get rid of? Well it’s time to give it a purpose while making your weekly meal planning a little bit easier.
I’m new to the family dinner game, but my husband and I struggled with deciding what to eat each night, even before we had a kid. Maybe you can relate? Since we didn’t know what we were eating each night, it made grocery shopping for the week basically pointless! We would end up buying things we didn’t need, forgetting things we did need and going back multiple times a week for small stuff. Since we’ve started meal planning for dinner using this system, we have obviously been more organized and less stressed; but are also able to spend more quality time with each other at home. We actually enjoy dinner time now! So what is our system?
It’s a Dinner Jar!
We have quite a few go-to meals that are pretty easy and we enjoy, so we decided to focus on those while we put our system together. I’ve had this apple cookie jar FOR-EV-ER and it is one of the main pieces of décor in my apple-themed kitchen; so I couldn’t just get rid of it. Cookies and candy just ended up wasting away in there before, but now we use it to hold our favorite dinner recipes!
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I made these super cute recipe cards on Canva that fit perfectly on a 4X6 blank index card; so printing is easy peasy! They are very basic. All we need for our meal planning system is what the meal is and what ingredients we need to buy to make it. The prep times can be helpful too. Download my FREE Dinner Jar Recipe Card Template below.
Meal Planning Made Easy
Every week we pull 5 random recipe cards from the jar and put them in an order that makes sense for our schedule. This is where the prep and total time comes in handy. If we have extra plans one night, we might put a quicker recipe on the calendar for that day. We also might not want to eat chicken 3 days in a row so organizing them after we pick them out of the jar is a quick fix to make our week run smoothly.
Next, we look at the ingredients and amounts we need for each recipe and make a grocery list to cover it all for the week! So easy and we now we aren’t spending time arguing about what to eat each night because we enjoy all of the recipes in the jar. Plus, we only need to make one trip to the grocery store. Y’all it’s so easy and so nice, plus our old “cookie” jar is being used again!
Just to Recap:
- Add your favorite dinner meals to the jar.
- Randomly pull out 5 recipe cards for your Mon-Fri week (or 7 for the whole week).
- Organize the cards and assign each dinner to a day.
- Compile a list of ingredients and amounts needed for each meal that week.
- Stress less and enjoy more.
As our family grows we will add more meals and might expand to breakfast and lunch, but for now this meal planning system is working like a charm! I can definitely see my kids getting excited about pulling the cards out. Hope you can get some use out of this meal planning tip too. Feel free to Pin it! and share with your friends and family! Enjoy!
Looking for more home tips and tricks? Check out some friends’ ideas on their blogs below:
Download my FREE Dinner Jar Recipe Card Template! Make sure to print onto a 4X6 BLANK index card for best results!
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This is such a sweet idea, Alex! Thank you for sharing this!
I love meal planning and recipe cards. This is a new spin to it and I bet my kids will like being more involved! Thanks for the cute free printable too.
This is great! My husband and I can totally be decisive about choosing dinner so this would work great!
This is such a great meal planning system! Keeps it fresh and interesting, but you still get everything planned.