Monthly menu calendar how to#

And, cost-wise, even if you do shop the sales, it does mean a higher overall cost of food. It’s more time you have to set aside to actually do the planning - and that can mean you may be less likely to actually plan your meals. However, weekly meal planning does mean you will be planning your menu much more frequently. You can also plan your meals around your local flyers and sales better, when you plan weekly. Unexpected illness or an unplanned financial expense can be managed without stress. Last minute changes, such as invitations out, won’t mess up your menu, since you can rearrange things a little easier. You do get a lot more flexibility meal planning weekly rather than monthly. You can match your meals to your schedule and your budget that much easier. Having a Master List of meal ideas makes monthly planning easier. But you could do your meal planning monthly too. How often do you want to plan?įirst, decide on how often you want to plan your menu. You just need to match up your meal ideas with your schedule. Once you have your Master List, the rest of your meal planning is a matter of drag-and-drop.

That’s why my meal plan process is made to be so quick and easy, it’s practically painless!

Meal planning seems to be a never-ending chore. But despite all my posts on planning ahead, it isn’t my favorite thing to do.

This handy-dandy Free Monthly Meal Planner for Excel is available at know how to make a meal plan. Print this tab on your next grocery trip and you’re good to go. It also has space for Notes so you can include your reminders or comments. It has a column each for Ingredients, Unit and Quantity.

Shopping – This tab gives you a detailed list of all the ingredients you need for your month’s worth of meals.

It also features a Recipe Link where you can put the link from where you found the recipe that you want to include in your meal plan and cook for your family.

Recipes – This tab contains the recipes for each dish.

It is very detailed so your measurements are exact as it contains the Amount and Unit of each required ingredient.

Ingredients – This tab contains the ingredients required for each dish.

This contains the Date, Main Dish, Servings and columns for two Side Dishes.

Meal Plan – With this tab, you can easily plan, write down, review and modify your meal plan.

The Free Monthly Meal Planner for Excel has four tabs that make it the ultimate in meal planning, as it offers four sections for managing meal plans, ingredients, recipes and shopping lists. This feature is especially useful for busy families to ensure that they don’t forget any ingredient in the grocery and that they eat a good, hearty meal together.

Meanwhile, Excel automatically compiles this into a weekly grocery list. With this template, you can input a month’s worth of meals and ingredients. The Free Monthly Meal Planner for Excel is a great template to provide you ease of use. Considering that meals are one of the most important times that you can have with your family seated in one table to dine and discuss a healthy, trusty meal planner is a must. Sometimes, so much so that they tend to not eat together as a family at all. Without a meal plan, most families would just resort to fast food and take outs.

Monthly menu calendar how to#