Once the school year begins, your family schedule probably includes work, school, meetings, a variety of school activities, and sports practices and games. Trying to figure out how to feed your family and get everyone where they need to be can be a real challenge. Planning dinners can save you time and money and even provide moments for family connection in the middle of our hectic schedules.

Meal planning requires some work ahead of time, generally on the weekend, but it will save you valuable time during the week. It will also reduce your anxiety because you won’t have to worry about what you are going to make for dinner and when you are going to find the time to make it. A meal plan will allow you to feed your family healthier food and reduce your anxiety.

How to make a meal plan

Before you start making your food plan, make sure you have your upcoming family schedule with you. On days when you have lots of commitments, schedule meals that are fast and simple. A useful reference for meal planning is to make a list of meals your family likes to eat. Encourage your family to suggest meal ideas so you don’t have to come up with all the meals on your own. Keeping the meal plan flexible is also a convenient trick for busy families. If you have all the ingredients on hand at the beginning of the week, you can easily replace that night’s meal with something easier when an unexpected commitment pops up.

Time saving Tricks

Here are some time saving tricks to help simplify your meal preparation on busy nights.

• Slow Cooker – Slow cookers are a busy woman’s best friend. You can put together a slow cooker meal in the morning when you have more time, and then dinner is ready when you get home from work or after shuttling kids to activities. Here are some tips on how to choose a slow cooker.
• Batch Cooking – When you have time to cook, you can prepare several meals at once. This can be a great way to take advantage of sales. One of my family’s favorite meals is Crock-Pot Pork Mole. When I find a sale on pork roasts, I buy a few and combine the roast and all the other ingredients in individual freezer bags. On cooking day, I take the bag out of the freezer, put all the contents into the slow cooker, and dinner is ready in the evening.
• Freezer Meals – Freezer meals are prepared in advance and then frozen for later use. You can either completely cook the meal so thawing and reheating are all that is needed, or you can prepare most of the steps in advance, so that all that’s left is cooking the meal.  On days when you have time to cook, you could make a double batch of your casserole or chili and freeze what you don’t eat on days when you have time to cook. This White Chicken Chili recipe would be easy to double and save for a later dinner.  If your family doesn’t like leftovers, an easy trick is to pop them in the freezer.  While you might not want to eat the same dinner two nights in a row, it can be a whole new dinner if you wait a week or two.

In our busy lives, food should be a way to bring our families together. Hopefully these tips can help you spend less time making dinner and more time enjoying dinner.