5 Meals a Week: Simplifying Dinner Routines

What does meal planning actually look like in your home?

I plan my meals a month at a time.

What that looks like is that I have a big binder with my favorite recipes, and it’s sorted by the main meat component in it—either chicken, beef, or pork—or if it’s a soup or salad, that’s also in another category.

Then I go through and pick out around 20-25 meals, whatever it looks like for that month, and I plan out five different meals for each week.

There’s always something that comes up. I’m not cooking every single night of the week, and it’s also nice to just get a couple of break nights and have a frozen pizza or something.

So I plan for five meals a week, and then I just kind of divvy out my favorite recipes into each week for that month so we’re not having too many of one type of meal each week. If I know I’m going to have a pasta recipe, then I’ll just do one pasta recipe that week.

This recipe-binder system is also the basis for my Family Meal Planning Bundle, which includes printable tools for organizing recipes and planning meals week by week.

When do you usually sit down to do your planning?

At the beginning of each week, I’ll go and see what’s on my meal-planning roster for that week.

I’ll sit down and write out my grocery list, and then if I notice that next week is blank, either in that moment I’ll sit down and plan the meals for the following month, or that following week when I don’t have any meals planned, I’ll just quickly go through and pick out our favorite meals.

How do you decide which meals to put into a given week?

I don’t really have specific meals planned for specific days.

I’m not one of those super-rigid people who does Taco Tuesdays and Pizza Fridays. I just kind of fly by the seat of my pants.

I’ll pick my five recipes for that week that are all kind of different from each other, so we have a variety of meals. Then each night, I’ll see what meals are on the roster for that week and just decide what I’m in the mood for that night.

Sometimes I’ll ask the family what they think sounds good so they can also feel like they’re providing input. Especially my two-year-old—she really loves to tell me which meal she would rather have that evening, and it also helps motivate her to eat more dinner.

How do you build your grocery list?

I have those five meals for the week stacked together at the front of the binder.

From there, I just look through the ingredients, toppings, sides—everything that goes into making that meal.

Then I just kind of know off the top of my head what we have in our pantry, refrigerator, or freezer, and I can build my grocery list from there.

I like to use the Google Keep app because I have a shared note in there with my husband where we can add stuff to our grocery list together. It also has checkboxes, so I’m able to just check items off as I’m going through the store.

What part of meal planning makes your life easier?

I feel like it’s actually pretty refined now.

Before I had my second child, I was pretty rigid. I had meals planned for every single day of the week, and I had specific meals planned for specific nights.

It just became too much.

For me, having that specific, rigid routine was overwhelming, and sometimes I had things on the menu for that night, and I just truly didn’t have the energy to make them. So I had to make do and push myself, and then I was just exhausted come nighttime.

Now I feel like I’m in a better place, just having allowed meals for each week where I know that we have the fresh groceries for them.

I go grocery shopping once a week, and it helps me stay organized. It also helps me not feel so bad if I don’t have the energy for something on a certain night.

It allows me that flexibility to listen to myself.

If one of my girls needs me that night—if my baby is teething and needs more cuddles, or if my older daughter just wants to spend time with me and play—then it gives me that option to spend more time with them instead of making dinner.

That flexibility is exactly why I like using a simple five-meals-a-week layout, and it’s the same approach I built into my Family Meal Planning Bundle.

How do you avoid wasting food?

This is a big reason why I only do five meals a week.

At some point throughout the week, we are going to have something come up that was unexpected—either meals with family, we’ll go out to eat, or it’s just a leftover night.

When I was doing seven meals a week and was very rigid about having a specific meal on a specific night, we were having a lot of waste.

A lot of it was either going to our dogs as scraps, or it was just turning bad before I could even use it.

Doing five meals a week really helps us keep a good rhythm and not see a lot of waste come the end of the week.

I also really try not to overpurchase snacks or produce that we’ll eat throughout the week. If we end up running out, then we’ll just do another smaller grocery trip to get the produce or little things we need.

Have you tried any meal-planning systems that didn’t work for you?

Honestly, I just kind of came up with my own meal-planning system.

My parents never really did meal planning. They would grocery shop maybe once a month, if that, and it just wasn’t a very recurrent thing in our home. I grew up eating a lot of things we could find in the pantry that were shelf-stable.

Because I didn’t really have a good base for where to start with meal planning, that’s why I became so rigid with the seven-days-a-week schedule and having a different meal every single night.

I’ve never really used another meal-planning system other than this, and it did fail because I was so rigid about it.

Food was going bad, meals weren’t being made, or we had too many leftovers, and it was causing a lot of waste.

Now where it’s at, I feel like it’s really been fine-tuned and perfected to fit my family.

Which is honestly the way it needs to be.

Meal planning isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s totally family-based.

If someone had never meal planned before, what would you tell them to start with?

Honestly, I would start them with how I’m doing it right now: five meals a week.

Only purchase groceries for those five meals, and have sides and vegetables readily available on hand.

I always have simple packet sides, like rice or mashed potatoes, frozen vegetables, canned fruit, canned vegetables—just something that’s super easy to make.

Even rolls that are frozen.

There’s a lot of stuff that can just be kept on hand as sides, and from there it’s really easy to make an entire meal out of what you have at home.

If you like having those basics written down instead of trying to remember them every week, my Family Meal Planning Bundle was designed around this exact kind of system.

Why do you keep meal planning?

I feel like this is a really dumb question. 😂

Obviously, my family needs sustenance, and I do like to have some sort of plan or routine for the week.

Because if not, then I’m scrambling every single night to make a meal, sustain my family, and not have a grumpy two-year-old.

So I always try to have some kind of plan in place.

A Little Something to Make Meal Planning Easier

Over time, I’ve learned that meal planning doesn’t need to be rigid to be helpful. Honestly, the more flexibility I’ve given myself, the better it has worked for our family.

I took the system I actually use in our home—the recipe binder, five-meals-a-week planning, grocery lists, and the little things I like to keep on hand—and turned it into a printable Family Meal Planning Bundle.

If you’re trying to find a meal-planning rhythm that works for your own family, you can find my Family Meal Planning Bundle here. Use what works for your home, change what doesn’t, and make it your own.