As promised, here are four meal-planning worksheets to help you get started with making a serious dent in your food budget and a big step toward a healthier diet. All of the files are PDFs; control-click or right-click the links and choose whatever looks closest to "Save As" to download the templates to your computer. To learn more about meal planning, check out the previous posts Setting Up Your Meal Planner and Discover Meal Planning.
 Full Day Meal Planner. That note pad I found in the discount bin at the store inspired this template. It offers a chart for planning a week's worth of dinners, plus boxes for jotting down ideas for breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. |
 Structured Meal Planner. This template resembles my spreadsheet system for meal planning. It offers space for a week's worth of meals, with rows for the main dish, a side vegetable, a side starch, a salad, and notes. |
 Visual Meal Planner. I had some fun with this one. It's basically the same as the Structured Meal Planner, but instead of rows you fill in cafeteria trays. I bought a stash of those trays for my own kitchen a while back out of elementary-school nostalgia. This worksheet also has room for a week's worth of meals. |
 Monthly Planner. If you prefer to think far ahead, or if you just want to have last week's meals close at hand for easy reference, try this monthly planner. It's a calendar page with spaces for you to fill in the month and the dates, and each day box has lines marked off for the components of your meal. |
Technorati Tags: food, healthy eating, meal planning
These are fantastic and just what I was looking for! My fiance and I are trying to eat as healthy, and budget-friendly as possible (we're saving up for our own wedding, and it's just a good idea to start our nest-egg now, right?) and I already make large improvised and extended (i.e. adding rice/beans/cauliflower as healthy fillers with meat, etc) healthy home-cooked meals and freeze them well in advance, but I wanted to shop and cook/freeze with a monthly idea like those you offer templates for here. Thank you! It's such a huge budget-saver, and food-saver.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! I wish you both the best of luck!
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the links have expired for these downloads. They look great and I'd love to have the updated link if possible. ..Just found your site and am looking forward to reading it further.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michelle
Fixed! Thanks for the notification.
ReplyDeleteThese look great! I especially like the full day planner but cannot seem to actually download it. Are the links working and the problem is on my end? Please let me know!
ReplyDeleteThe links work for me. You may need a Google account to access the documents. Log in with your Google account (it would be your Gmail address if you have one), and then you should have access to the PDFs.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently working on a web-based meal planner (it'll be free).. I'm hoping to have it done in a few weeks, but you can read a bit about it at http://blog.kitchenpc.com/
ReplyDeleteLove it! Thanks for sharing:)
ReplyDeleteJust what I'm looking for. Thank you so much for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThanks a million... My mom is 83 and I want to help her organize her daily eating ideas...
ReplyDeleteHi i am very interested in obtaining access to your downloadable templates...I love the way you formatted them....Is that possible? Thank you so much in advance!
ReplyDeleteNice Post!!
ReplyDeletePlease look here at Monthly Meal Plan