Once you’ve started to embrace the many virtues of meal planning, you might start wondering how you can meal plan faster. Even though we all know meal planning is worth the effort, it’s only natural to wonder if you’re being as efficient as you can be. Here’s some advice on how you can meal plan faster to maximize your time savings.

1. Start with what you have

If you sit down to map out your meals for the week with no game plan, it’s going to take you a while. Instead, head to the fridge first and see what you have that you could use as a starting point. Is there a brick of cheese you opened recently that you should try to use up? Are those courgettes you bought a few days ago going to turn soon? Let these foods guide your meals for the week, and then everything should fall into place a lot faster.  

2. Use tech tools

Even though it may be satisfying to see your meal plan written out, one of the biggest time-savers when it comes to meal planning is taking advantage of technological tools that can make the task easier. When I’m teaching meal planning for beginners, I always recommend using meal planning templates, calendars and similar tools. 

My best and very simple tip is to use Google Calendar, and assign your meals to the specific days. You can even copy your plans from previous weeks into upcoming weeks, or have them recur after a few weeks. You might not want to eat the same things this week that you had every night last week, but you could click back to last month or the month before, choose a week with a similar schedule to the current one, and just follow the same plan. 

3. Meal plan when you’re hungry

We all know we’re never supposed to go to the grocery store when we’re hungry because everything just looks so delicious when your stomach is empty, but the same can’t be said for meal planning. In fact, the opposite is true: if you’ve just had a big meal and you’re trying to figure out what to make next week, nothing is going to sound good. But if you meal plan when you’re hungry, it will be much easier to find foods that sound appealing – and you just may have that extra motivation to finish quicker so you can grab a bite to eat!

4. Have theme nights

Another tip I love is having theme nights. You don’t want to do it every night of the week, but try to choose a couple days of the week that will always follow a certain theme. Meatless Mondays are hugely popular right now as people try to move toward a healthier plant-based diet, but you should choose themes that work with your schedule and your family’s tastes. 

For example, maybe every Thursday could be pasta night since pasta is quick to cook and your kids have after-school activities that run late on Thursdays, or perhaps you’ll go with Seafood Tuesdays as that’s the day you do your weekly grocery shopping and you want to eat seafood when it’s at its freshest. I’m also a big fan of Slow Cooker Sundays as you can make something hands-off and enjoy more time with the fam.

5. Plan to plan

Decide which day of the week is best to meal plan on, and then decide on the best day/s to do the shopping. I like to meal plan a few days in advance so I have ample time to shop. We buy a lot of our groceries online, but once a week we make a quick stop at a store that we love that does not have the online shopping option. In a nutshell – we’ve found a system that works for us. It did take a little trial and error, and from time to time we do revisit it because our schedules change and we realise it’s not working anymore. Whatever you decide – put it in your calendar. Make it a habit to look at what you’ve got planned for the upcoming week on a Sunday or Monday morning, and daily at some point in the evening for the next day.

6. Seek inspiration from others

Who says you have to be the one doing all your meal planning? Whether you’ve discovered you’re just not cut out for meal planning or you’re simply too busy to do it and would rather spend your time on something else, there is nothing wrong with using ready-made meal plans.

I’ve come up with The Dinner Plan, a meal plan subscription geared toward busy mums who want to cook easy, family-friendly dinners quickly. One recipe a week is a batch cooking recipe, allowing you to build up a nice stock of freezer meals for those days you’re too busy to cook, and you can import the ingredients from the shopping lists into maltasupermarket.com to save even more time! I’ll be opening the doors again October 20th, so check it out!