My meal planning (or unplanning) is a little quirky but it works for my family of five! Many people wake up in the morning and dig through the freezer (or even wait until they get off of work) to figure out what is for dinner that night. You know, I am not that much different – even though I kind of meal plan.

Why do I meal plan? To put it simply, I want to simplify my life and also save money. So how exactly do I prepare for 40 meals in advance? Does that seem overwhelming to you?

The first thing to note is that I do keep a very well-stocked pantry and freezer.

At any given time, you will find at least 20-40 lbs of chicken breast and 10 lbs of burger meat plus multiple other varieties of meat and frozen vegetables in the freezer and the pantry, you will find the staples to make just about everything. When I find a good price on an item, I buy a ton of them. If I have coupons, I buy even more. By buying these things when they are on sale, I can save later when the money needs to stretch even further – then I just need to pick up a few odds and ends or perishable items to make a ton of meals.

I have this meal planning board that is so loosely meal planning.

Have commitment issues? Yeah, me too. I cannot commit to a specific meal on a specific day a week in advance. With this meal planning board, I go through my cards (and let my husband and kids do the same so they actually look forward to dinners) and choose a handful of cards. On the board (that I made straight from the craft store supplies), there are three cups “have”, “new”, and the last cup is old faithful recipes I love but I don’t have the ingredients for at this time.

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On the back of each card is the name of the cookbook and the page that the recipe can be found on. You can also use Pinterest, but I love my real paper cookbooks.

If there is an asterisk on the front, that means there are quickly perishable ingredients inside the recipe so that recipe should be made sooner rather than later. On the back of the card with an asterisk, you will see the perishable items that are in that recipe which means you can plan another recipe the next day using the other half of the green pepper, green onion or ricotta cheese you may have left! This little trick helps keep you from wasting money by using perishable items before they go bad!

But Melanie, I don’t like the same thing over and over! That is okay – We don’t either. We have our favorite meals on the meal board then I write down more meals on a piece of paper (again with the cookbook name and page number). This allows me to try new recipes without being committed to them being on a card. If I try them and the family loves them, I make them a card for my meal planning board.

This meal planning session took me about an hour. As I went through the recipes in the cookbooks, I wrote down what I needed to complete the meals keeping in mind what I already had in stock in the pantry and freezer. I wrote down 35 meals I could create with a pretty minimum grocery list. For these 38 recipes, I spent $118 on additional ingredients necessary! I do understand that not everyone has a lot of room to store extra food, but if you can store extra food, buy extras of things you use frequently when you see a good deal. If you are not able to store extra groceries, that is okay too. This meal unplan will still work for you! Write out your grocery list (separating it into sections of the grocery store – meat, produce, dairy, dry goods) and stick to your list and you will come out saving money!