Four Simple Meal Planning Strategies

Unless you truly love it at all times and haven't burned out by now, cooking meals every day for your family can wear on you. Here are some ideas that may help.

1. Commit to actually cooking. Let's face it. There are days (or busy weeks) where it is simply easier and quicker to pull up to a drive-thru, grab pre-cooked food to bring home, order pizza delivery, or pull some kind of frozen entree with a hundred ingredients out of the freezer to microwave. Needless to say this is costlier and less healthy, but it saves you the time of planning, grocery shopping, preparing, and then cleaning up.

So half the battle is simply deciding in advance that you are going to cook and being prepared to do so. Take the pressure off. Because that's what's overwhelming you. You don't have to prepare a masterpiece of a meal or be Ms Creative and cook something new each time. Just plan to keep it simple.

2. Start by thinking of the meals you know by heart. The ones you can throw together easily without using a recipe. I like to prepare my tomato sauce and keep it in the fridge...then just throw some pasta into boiling water once a week. I also make double portions when I cook my simple chili or soups (crock pots rule!), freeze them in individual containers, and then defrost as needed for a meal. And let's not forget breakfast for dinner. There's nothing wrong with an omelet and French toast for dinner once a week. I also like to cook up a batch of chicken breasts to chop up throughout the week and use for burritos, stir fries with some veggies over rice, or just to munch on cold as a healthy snack.

So think about a goal of making a list of the basic meals that work for your family that you can rotate every two weeks. This way you aren't trying to come up with new menus every week.

3. Fool around with new recipes on weekends. If you find yourself with a relaxing Friday evening, Saturday, or Sunday, with no pressure to whip something up quickly, that's a good time to experiment with making something new that you've wanted to try. The first few times you have to prepare something by following a recipe can take a bit longer...but once you develop your own system for making it, it can be much quicker for you to put together on a weeknight.

4. Keep an eye on your fridge and pantry/cabinets weekly. As a neat freak, one of the things I can control is what I keep in the fridge. So each week I will throw out the produce that wilted and the tupperware full of whatever wasn't finished as leftovers, and unwrap the aluminum foil that contained something that now looks yucky. But as I do this, I will also usually be reminded of something that I had in there that I can make a meal out of. Something I may have forgotten I even bought. Same goes for the cabinets. I will frequently pull up a step stool and move around all of my canned and packaged goods to find two or three things that I can use for a quick meal. This week I threw together baked beans with penne pasta. Tossed it all up together and it was delicious!

And, PS, I will also throw in that sometimes what prevents me from preparing a good meal is the time it takes to wash and chop all those veggies. So sometimes I will either use frozen veggies to steam or stir fry, or I will buy, fresh from the grocery store, the already chopped peppers, onions, etc.

If you are looking for some new ideas for your meals, CLICK HERE for starters.

(HuffPost)