A fun dinner menu for your family’s meal planning

Every week, we take the guesswork out of dinner planning by putting together a menu for the entire week. I’m lucky to have married a man who cooks, so he and I switch off weeks for cooking. On Saturdays, he or I will create the dinner plan for the week, creating our shopping list from that menu plan.

Btw, I talk a lot about time saving tips like meal planning in my book, Reclaim Your Creative Soul, a guide to organizing your full-time life to make room for your craft. I even include a 30-day meal guide and coordinating shopping list! Find out more about it here.

Back to the meal plan…. Usually we just jot it down on binder paper and pin it to the refrigerator. The kids appreciate knowing what we’re eating each day (although, sometimes it dictates whether they’ll be home for dinner or not), and we never stand in front of the refrigerator feeling lost because the plan is already created.

Lately, though, I’ve been playing around with creative menus, putting together fun templates through Word as if I was creating an actual restaurant menu. Here’s the latest:

 

We usually have the more involved meals on the weekends (though tonight I’m going out, so the rest of the family gets pizza). During the week, I make meals that take very little prep time and are 30 minutes or less to make. By midweek, we generally have a lot of leftovers, so I always incorporate a make-your-own meal night (plus, the teens really should make their own food at least once a week). And Fridays we either go out or have breakfast, because by the end of the week, I’m so over cooking.

This template I used isn’t anything fancy. I just took an already created Word template for a menu, but tweaked the background and the wording.

Would you like to download it for yourself? CLICK HERE for a word doc you can easily edit.

P.S. The photo I have above is not on this week’s menu, but one you may want to try. It’s Honey Ginger Soy Chicken from the Mom 100 Cookbook. Find the recipe here, along with information on the great cookbook it came from.

What are your family’s favorite dinner ideas?