It will be easy to skip the drive-thru and cook at home when you plan meals you love. Build a favorite meals list to make the meal planning, shopping, and kitchen prep easier!
Want to save this post?
Enter your email below and get it sent straight to your inbox. Plus, I’ll send you budget recipes and money-saving tips every week!
There’s no shortage of cheap dinner ideas out there, but the best meal ideas are the ones you want to eat. It’s true. If you don’t like it or simply don’t want to eat it, it won’t go very far to save you money.
The Good Cheap Eats System is designed to increase your grocery savings while also limiting food waste. One way to do this is to make sure that you plan your favorite meals for dinner.
Keeping a list of 10-12 of your favorite meals make meal planning so much easier!
Why Do This
You’ll save time. When you make a favorite meals list, planning your meals will be quick and easy. No more wracking your brain for ideas!
You’ll save money. With a list of your favorite meals at hand, you can easily calculate the food cost of each and keep tabs on which ingredients to stock. With your own budget grocery list on hand, you’ll be able to make good use of sales.
You’ll avoid decision fatigue. Knowing what recipes your family loves, means that you won’t be testing recipes on them all the time. You can dial in that delicious chicken pasta with goat cheese or make that favorite meat sauce on a regular rotation, knowing everyone will be happy.
How to Make a Favorite Meals List
Figuring out how to mesh your own food preferences with those of the picky eaters in your family can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.
This may be an easy exercise. Just ask your people what are their favorite meals. Perhaps everyone says basically the same things and you go on your merry way.
However, if it doesn’t appear to be easy, here are some strategies to help build your catalog of go-to, favorite meals.
1. Write down your meal plans.
Keep a record of what you eat for several weeks. Just write down what you have for dinner and whether or not everyone liked it.
Make whatever notes you’ll need to remember if that meal was a hit or not. You can download this calendar to keep a record for the next month.
Write down every dinner that you actually eat. You’re going to refer back to it later. Add a star or happy face if the meal was a success. It it was a total disaster, mark that, too.
If you can, add a little note about what was on your schedule that day. Was this a soccer practice night? Would the meal have worked better on a different night, just not a night when you had a lot going on?
Our eating habits are effected by our lives, so our favorite meals will reflect that season of life.
2. Determine your goals.
Ask yourself, “What are our meal planning goals? What’s most important in how we eat?”
It might be that you want to stay under your grocery budget, keep to certain culinary standards, eat healthfully and unprocessed, or a combination of them all. You might be pressed for time and need meals on the go in addition to the above.
You might have a myriad of goals. Identify what they are so that your favorite meals list will help you reach those goals.
What if a favorite meal, like steak and lobster, is counter to your savings goal? It can still be a favorite, but maybe not one to put in your regular meal plan rotation.
3. Analyze your habits and preferences.
Consider the following questions so that you can look at your family’s habits more objectively.
- What do you like to eat?
- What goes to waste and why?
- What prevents you from meeting your food goals? Is it poor planning, crazy schedules, or something else?
- What makes a meal a success? What signifies a train wreck?
We want this core list of favorite meals to be easy to make, well-liked by everyone in the family, and supportive of your overall goals.
4. Put your favorite meals list to good use!
If you don’t already have some kind of household planner, you might want to create a small meal planning notebook. Stash your favorite meals list here along with printouts of the recipes so that it’s easily accessible to everyone in the household.
Prefer to go digital, store your list in your favorite app and manage the share settings that way.
Once you’ve got your go-to list of favorite meals, you can
- Price each recipe out so you know how they rank in terms of expense. Plan the cheaper meals more often to stretch your grocery budget farther.
- Create a budget grocery list so that you can easily keep track of what you need and buy extras when you’re shopping the sales and clearance.
- Plan your favorite meals in a weekly rotation so that you can enjoy them often and make homecooking more of a habit.
Remember that you can add to and subtract recipes from this favorite meals list as your tastes and season of life change.
Meal Planning Tips
What do you think?
Let’s chat in the comments!
This post was originally published on August 19, 2012. It has been updated for content and clarity.
