Menu planning was a hot topic in the survey from last year. I had many requests from readers to share my monthly menu plans. They do take some time to put together in a decent format for the blog, so when I have time I will share them.
As we wait for approval of the Planning With Kids Menu Planner App, I am using the test version for my family’s menu planning. It is probably still a couple of weeks until the app will be released.
The table below shows our family menu plan for the month of March. For how I generate our monthly plan, head to this post – How To Menu Plan For A Month In 35 Minutes!
(NB. The app plans Monday to Sunday at the moment and I plan from Saturday to Friday, so Monday in this plan is really Saturday for us and so on!)
When you create the menu plan in the app, a shopping list is then created. You can then either use the shopping list directly on your iPhone and check off the items you have, or you can email the list to yourself or someone else, as highlighted by the black arrow:
I have pasted the contents of the shopping list emails into word docs, turned them into PDFs and zipped them together, so they can be easily downloaded.
PWK Menu Planning App – March Plans
How is your menu planning going?
I am interested to see what time frame people most commonly plan for. If you have time I would love it if you could drop me a note in the comments to let me know – thanks!Tweet
49 comments...read them below or add one
I plan for a week. I shop for meat and veg and fish weekly, off my plan…
BUT, I often know in my head what will be appearing on the next few weeks plans, based on the meat/fish specials I have picked up that are in the freezer…
I sometimes wish I had a bigger freezer to take more advantage of the sales for meat.
I can’t believe how much time and stress menu planning saves. I generally do a week at a go, but I have done a year one time. A friend that does home schooling said that was what she did. It didn’t work too well, in terms of actually eating it but what it did was gave me an idea of what to have.I found that as the year progressed some of the things that were favourites at the start had fallen out of favour, however it was an interesting experiment. I have it in Outlook so everyday a new suggestion pops up.
I shop for fruit and veg once a week and other stuff once a fortnight.
A year is amazing! I have never made it beyond 6 weeks.
Great news about the impending App Nicole! You’ve definitely been busy!
I try to menu plan for the week but do it from Wed to Tues (as payday is Wed and is when I go shopping). I bake and cook ahead as much as possible and freeze in meal size portions to make dinnertime easier.
The menu plan will use a combination of meals in the freezer and quick meals like steak and roast veg salad (i roast the veg during the day).
Like Lucy, I also pick up meat specials and freeze them for future meals.
Love hearing what others do. It has been interesting to see, that not many seem to actually plan from Monday to Sunday!
I must be the except to the rule because I plan one week at a time from Monday to Sunday
I do one weekly shop (on Monday mornings) after I’ve spent a bit of time on Sunday evening putting together a plan for the week’s meals. I do have a rough outline (like you!) for what types of meals work best on certain nights (Thursday is left-overs as it’s swimming night & Wednesdays are ‘wraps’ night etc). Helps make the process a little bit quicker. I also tend to recycle weekly meal plans from previous months. I just pull up an old plan and decide that’s exactly what we will have this week too! Too easy 
We menu plan for the month and it takes about 15mins. We use a Publisher calendar and insert the meals under each date. It has been much quicker since we made a “master meal list”. This is in Word and we just cut and paste the meals and side dishes straight into the calendar along with any extras not on the master list. We try to have a chicken, mince and steak meal each week. We have had to consider certain days such as Tuesdays which is kids swimming lessons at 6pm, so we need an quick and easy meal that night. We also had to add “easy tea” Saturday because of social engagements and the odd day where we Couldn’t be bothered doing a normal meal. It has made our lives much easier, hrocery shopping easy and no more deciding what to have for dinner at 5pm!
15 minutes for a month is fabulous – you really have your process sorted Linda
Hi Nicole, can’t wait for the app!
I’m fairly new at menu planning and can’t believe i haven’t given it a go earlier, i honestly don’t enjoy cooking and my meals are usually very simple and plain, I plan for a week at the moment, starting wednesdays, as this is payday and shopping day, I shop off my plan and am quite excited to say i have been trying to include at least one new recipe a week. I’ve just started baking on a Sunday, which my kids are loving!! I’ll attempt to do some “bulk” cooking and freezing soon, but for the moment I’m loving the organisation the menu plan is giving me
no more “what’s for dinner” and 5pm chaos!!
Does the app have the ability to change the week commencing to(eg) a wednesday?
Not in the first stage, but it is a change I would like to see happen ASAP. As I plan monthly I have a pen and paper version that I write up with the kids first. I plan from Saturday to Friday, so I then just choose Saturday’s meal and allocate it to Monday, choose Sunday’s meal and allocate it to Tuesday. When I print out the list, I just put a line through Monday and write Saturday there and so on. It is an ok work around for the moment.
I menu plan for an 8 day week (Sunday to Sunday). I usually just make sure that I have enough food to cover us for that last Sunday just in case. My menu planning has varied so much from completely planned and organised on proper forms to my current write it out on anything and keep it easy mode. Some weeks I find menu planning stressful. And that’s a bit of a worry. I keep salad and fresh meals towards the beginning of the week when my vegies are still fresh and things that don’t require as many fresh items towards the end of the week. Otherwise I cut and freeze what I can.
Sometimes by Friday our fridge can be very bare!
I’m new to menu planning as well (thanks PQ!) but when I do it I find cooking a breeze. I am doing it weekly – Thursday to Wednesday – but the only thing for me is remembering to menu plan each Wednesday. Quite often with everything going on I forget and then I have to catch up. Great idea to buy meat on special and freeze – I do that on an adhoc basis, but not ‘strategically’, which I will now!
That was one of the reasons I moved to monthly planning – it seemed every time I turned around it was planning time again as the weeks fly by so quickly.
After finding your wonderful blog 9 months ago I have been been planning for a month at a time. In the first week I buy all the meat, label it and put it in the freezer. Our menu sits on the fridge which means that it’s easy for my husband to help . It takes me a around an hour to plan but that’s probably because I like finding new recipes to try!
Planning has meant that I only need to go the supermarket once a week, which is a great help when you have two little ones.
Thanks for sharing Ceinwyn! Sounds like you have a solid process going there. There are months when my plan takes longer because like you, I aim to find some new seasonal recipes to cook. I could spend hours looking at foodie magazines and blogs.
I am also new to menu plan, at present I do my menu plan on a Sunday night based around the week activities. I also include on the same sheet my weekly schedule. I post it on my fridge and it’s terrific everyone has a choice and its work well. From this I know what my weekly shop is, which saves me money and more time in the afternoon. Thanks Planning Queen, very efficient and cost saving. Looking forward to App
Thanks for sharing your process Susan. If I ever forget to put our plan up on the fridge, the kids will always ask me about it – they love having it up there to see too.
I have been meaning to try menu planning for sooooo long now. Each time I see it come up on your blog nicole, I have grand plans, but never seem to get pro-active. Maybe with your fab new app, I might be able to manage it. I tend to shop weekly & always manage the first & second meal, the rest get made up as I go along, in a mad panic b/c it’s nearing 5 o’clock!!
The app is so very easy to use, it might just get you over the line and planning!
Really looking forward to the release of the app! Your menu looks quite similar to mine this month – yum!
I am really pleased with the way the app is looking.
Wow that looks exquisite! You Hve converted me to a monthly planning gal
I find it is a more effective use of my time to plan monthly – good luck with it.
I started menu planning when baby number 3 came along as I constantly found I was forgetting to organise anything for dinner that night!
I have a chart on word that I fill in and print out every week. I also plan my eldest’s school lunches and more recently the little ones lunches and snacks at home. I find it keeps me from over thinking about what I’m going to feed them from day to day and saves so much from going to waste from “overshopping” too.
This month I’m trying a slightly different approach. I have roughly planned out the whole month, but am sticking to printing out the chart a week at a time so I can tweak it if I need to. As I was sometimes finding I was planning in a rush just before going shopping and not taking into consideration things like school activities and what leftovers could be used up. We’ll see how it goes…
Good luck with the approach, it is good to give new ideas a try.
I menu plan once a week from Friday to Thursday. I do my grocery shopping online and the delivery days are Wednesday or Friday, but Friday suits my payday. I need to allow a little flexibility, because I like to order a mixed seasonal fruit and veg box with my order, so I can make sure all the veggies get used.
I tried the veggie box order, but just couldn’t make it work for us unfortunately.
I am now the happy planner of a week – this is new for me;) I use a weekly planner and put it on my fridge and put sticky notes of the meals we will have on it so I can move around. Haven’t progressed to using a computer or phone. Great to hear of your app.
Sticky notes are a cute idea!
I love to have a menu plan, but not so good at actually doing one. When I do it is usually a Sunday to Saturday plan, as we tend to shop on Saturday or Sunday afternoons (when we are both home, and can kid-wrangle together).
I have actually just bought a vinyl decal of a pretty picture frame with the days of the week in it, to stick on the fridge and write my menu plan direct onto the fridge with a white-board marker – I a hoping this encourages me to actually do the menu plan each week.
We also need to invest in a large chest freezer of some sort, because I just don’t have room to freeze extra portions, or meat specials, along with the veg, spare loaf of bread etc in the little fridge freezer.
I would like more freezer space too. I think we will maybe get one next year. With baking for the kids lunches and freezing stuff, I am running into space issues all the time.
Thanks Nicole, I love your monthly menu plan!
I plan a week ahead, from Monday to Saturday. I don’t like freezing raw meat (defrosted meat doesn’t taste good, in the opinion of myself and my husband) so I shop every second day and we pretty much always eat fresh food.
Like you, I have a ‘formula’ ie Monday is often a roast so we have cold meat for sandwiches for the next couple of days. Wednesday is something easy to re-heat because of swimming after school, Thursday is usually fish. Friday is often left overs. Saturday is usually something that is a bit more fiddly or more time consuming to make cos I have that time.
I try to do 1 vegetarian, 1 fish meal, 1 not-much-meat-meal (such as a bacon & veg pasta), 1 left overs meal per week. I work from a master list and try not to have more than one carbohydrate-heavy dish (eg pasta or risotto) a week. I aim for at least 5 different vegies per meal.
I love cooking but it is the thinking of what to cook that bores me so your monthly plan and recipes are fabulous.
As for baking, I am always baking!! In the last 8 days, I have made apricot caramel slice , banana cake, ANZAC slice and berry muffins. Some of these went in the freezer, some eaten by visitors and some we took to friends’ places. I seem to be forever baking.
Thanks so much for the slice recipes! Will definitely give them a try. If they turn out are you happy for me to share them here on the blog?
Nic
I plan weekly for Sunday to Friday – Saturday night is always take away or eat out. Sunday I cook something more fiddly because that is when I have the time and I always make something that will have enough for us to eat on Monday too because that is swimming night for us (never any complaints because it usually something a little special). We sometimes have leftovers during a week so I always plan for one meal that can be made with pantry and/or frozen stuff so if I don’t get to cook it that week it goes on next week’s plan.
Sounds like a very organised approach Linda.
I started off planning for a week but found that it is better for me now to do a monthly plan. That way I can also include in my plan baking for upcoming events like birthdays. I write any special events or days I would like to celebrate with my family (such as St Valentine’s or St Patrick’s Day) on my menu plan sheet first and then work the menu around these. (I also add in leftovers and pre-cooked frozen meals as part of the menu plan so I’m not cooking 7 evening meals from scratch each night). It does take a little longer to do initially but honestly once I’m in the groove it comes together pretty easily (and means I don’t have to think about it for another month). I also keep my plans to refer back to. I write up the monthly plan on a monthly sheet as well as on a weekly menu planner that stays on the fridge. As I’m writing my monthly plan if I’m really organised I’ll also write up shopping lists for each week with items needed for that weeks recipes and put them in an envelope with the dates for that week on it. Then when it’s that week the list goes from the envelope onto the fridge to add any other general items we require (eg toilet paper).
We seem to have very similar processes. I just stick our plans and shopping lists on a clip on the fridge. And I am also a big fan of having a night of cooking!
I’m not a naturally organized person but I love menu planning! It saves so much time, stress and money. I plan and shop monthly as we live in a rural area and have the storage space space for large amounts of food (a perk of living in a farmhouse!) I top up on fresh produce, milk and bread weekly and also keep an eye out for specials that I can buy in bulk. A very organized friend shops every three months; I’d love to try this but haven’t got my head around quantities for such a big shop yet. So looking forward to your app…will it be available in NZ?
I love stocking up – wish I had more space to do so. I am pretty sure the app will be available world wide, but I will double check and let you know.
[...] of meals for your family and then print out the associated shopping list.Or you can check out my March Monthly Menu Plan and download the weekly plans and shopping lists.If you have a healthier type of muffin recipe, [...]
I menu plan from Sat to Fri. I’ve done 6 weeks before but only when the inlaws have come to stay with us as my Mother in Law has dietary restrictions that mean I have to make some significant adjustments to some of our favourite meals or omit fast favourites altogether. I find menu planning for their whole stay takes the stress out of it for me.
Also my partner cooks one weekend night so planning Sat to Fri means he can decide what he wants to make during the weekend on Sat morning and then we market shop to suit! Can’t wait to see the App
Hi Nicole, firstly I loved your book and have learnt so much from it, thankyou. I menu plan from Thursday to Wednesday because I do my weekly shop of Thursdays. I find doing it weekly easier than monthly because I’m not sure what will be on special and what might be happening around our house at the time (the unexpected). I buy up on meat (usually in bulk) when on sale so my usual menu plan would always revolve around what meat I have in the freezer. You referred my to another site where I can imput my own recipes which has been so fantastic for me. Thanks so much for all your wonderful advice and also your awesome book.
Lovely to hear from you Leanne and thanks for your kind words. I have really enjoyed reading how others plan.
[...] of meals for your family and then print out the associated shopping list.Or you can check out my March Monthly Menu Plan and download the weekly plans and shopping lists.What’s your favourite vegetarian [...]
I’m new to the whole meal planning thing (as in, today is my first day) and I nearly wept when I found this.
I love you, Nic. Yes, it’s love.
x
xx – your comment made me smile!
[...] of meals for your family and then print out the associated shopping list.Or you can check out my March Monthly Menu Plan and download the weekly plans and shopping lists.Are you making Easter gifts for family or [...]