Do you find yourself wondering, “ugh, what’s for dinner tonight?” on the regular? Or better yet “you guys need to eat again?” Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Most parents that come to me for help find coming up with dinner ideas really challenging. Enter the “Weekly Meal Ideas” tracking system.
This simple spreadsheet is guaranteed to help you spend less time searching for ideas in the depths of the internet. In fact, this tracking system came to life after hearing from many of the parents on the podcast say that they have a master list of healthy meals that their family loves.
This helps them to:
- Easily access meal ideas they feel good about
- Inspire them when they’re feeling stuck
- Stop the endless scrolling for ideas
Use the Weekly Meal Idea System to Stop Wondering What’s for Dinner
What else could you do with the brainpower you’re currently using to build meal plans and come up with new weekly meal ideas?
Here’s my list:
- Remember to feed the dog in a timely manner
- Think about washing my hair
- Stop forgetting where I put my coffee and drinking it cold
And those are just the first three things that I thought of 😉
If you find yourself lost in the Pinterest abyss on the regular, you’re using precious time getting distracted and sorting through 100s/1000s/1,000,000s of recipes that:
- Your family won’t like
- You don’t have time to make
- Don’t meet your family’s dietary needs
Stop the madness! There’s a better way.
Create a Master List of Weekly Meal Ideas
In our podcast interviews, so many of the real parents we’ve talked to have shared that their #1 tip for easy meal planning is to have a master list of meals their family loves. Do you have a list of weekly meal ideas yet?
If not, let’s make one! With about an hour of your time, you could get this list going and cut hours off your weekly meal planning process on a monthly basis. Now that’s a good investment!
Here’s my 4 step process for building your master list of weekly meal ideas:
BTW, you can skip step 1! Enter your email in the box below and I’ll send you my Weekly Meal Idea template along with 10 great meal ideas to get started.
Prefer to watch?
Start a Google Doc:
- Open a New Google Spreadsheet and label it “Weekly Meal Ideas:
- Across the top row, enter the following titles: Dish, Link, Notes, Did they like it?
Start filling it in with your family’s favorite meals and the recipe links that go along with them
- How many meal ideas to do you have so far? I recommend trying to populate your Weekly Meal Idea template with at LEAST 30 ideas – that means you could go a whole month without wandering over to Pinterest in search of ideas
- Right away I like to mark the ones we’ve loved and tried with a “Y” in the “Did they like it?” column (Column D)
- I also enter any notes about the dish in the “Dish” column (Column C) – this is especially useful for adaptations you make to the ingredients or techniques (e.g. use brown rice pasta or cook 15 min instead of 20)
Need more ideas? It’s time to search for them and continue filling in the spreadsheet
BTW – if you sign up for my free email list above, I’ll send you the Google spreadsheet for tracking along with 10 healthy, family-friendly recipes to get your started!
- Now go open Pinterest or Google (it’s up to you) and search your family’s favorite meal:
- Fill in the Dish and Link fields, along with any notes you might have
- Leave “Did they like it?” blank
Update it ongoing:
- Try a new recipe that your family loves? Add it to the list
- Try one of the recipes that you added and they didn’t love it? Delete it
- I love doing this because now you have a master list of weekly meal ideas but you can sort by the ones your family loves using column D
Want my pre-made master weekly meal idea template? I’ll send you the customizable template along with 10 healthy, family-friendly recipes to get you started. Just join our email list below!
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