Healthy Meal Planning 101

What is Healthy meal planning?

It sounds pretty simple right? Plan meals with recipes. Then buy the ingredients. Make the food. Sounds simple right?

Why should you healthy meal plan?

You will eat healthy

Have you ever been so tired and hungry you find yourself in the check out line of your favourite fast food place eating a hamburger and fries? Or is that just me? Or it’s 5pm and your kids are screaming and you look in the fridge thinking what am I making today! Some basic meal planning will help you throughout the week and avoid these situations.

You save money

Meal Planning helps your wallet! There will be less impulse buying and you won’t buy random foods and find them later in your fridge. Hey what was I going to do with this kale? Healthy tip: you can sauteé kale with butter and Epicure’s Chilli Flakes & Garlic Topper for a tasty side dish https://annedickson.epicure.com/en-ca/product/1001124

Clean out the fridge/pantry

So, gross fun fact; my mom was over making food and she was like, “Anne, this expired a year ago!”. Yep, I had something in the pantry that had been there… for way too long. But it was in the back, never used.Take the time to go through and take out anything expired or you haven’t used in a long time, keep the things that you are going to be needing within the next month or two

Organize your cupboards

Healthy Meal Planning doesn’t have to be hard when your cupboards are up to do date. Marie Kondo your space and take a look at what’s in there. Are things organized? Are spices falling out of the shelves? Organize and group things into logical order.Take stock of what’s missing and get some basics. Check out this other post on how to organize your Pantry

Look at your family’s schedule for the week.

Does little Billy have a zoo field trip? Is your partner out for one evening and is going to miss dinner? Keep all this mind for dinner and planning if you know you all have to go to little Johnny’s soccer practice at 6pm during meal time. It’ll be easy to see what you’ll need for this week’s groceries if you know everyone’s schedules

This is the fun part! I can’t stress this enough, if this is your first time doing a meal plan feel free to start by only doing a few meals a week or not adding 5 brand new recipes into the mix. It’s okay to meal plan your true favourites like tacos or one of your staple go to’s. Eg. Last week I picked one with tomatoes and green beans. This isn’t that revolutionary or exciting, but I knew it was “different” for my toddler who would be like hey what are these beans? Check out the recipes here on my Epicure site

Look at what’s in your fridge

If you have something you need to use (eg you bought a lot of carrots) plan something that has carrots in it. Use what you already have so in this way, you’ll save more money while trying new recipes.

Check what’s on sale

Check what’s on sale at your local grocery store and make a recipe around it. Also check out Checkout 51 for Grocery coupons and Flipp, an app for discounts in your hood. It’s not sexy but it saves you some money.

Check what is in season

Healthy Meal planning is much easier when you shop in season. For example, today i was at the grocery store and Carrots, Zucchinis and corn were in season and local!

Recipes

If you are like Anne, I just spend an hour cleaning my fridge, planning my schedule. Now you want me to plan meals? If you want some help Epicure guide with recipes to cook 100 different meals, including 24 new recipes. If you want even more help, the Good Food Real Results Collection will provide you with the guide, food portion scoops, and lots of help!
Pick a few recipes you want to make for the week. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also, a great easy hack is a dinner idea where you can make extras and then serve it for lunch