Meal-Planning Strategy for Quick, Easy Dinners Every Night

This does take work, but when you have finished you will have a meal planning, purchasing, and preparing system for putting quick and easy (and family-favorite) homemade, healthy dinners on the table every single night. (My current average time for cooking dinner is 12 minutes a day)

  • Make your list of meals
  • Set up your list and calendar
  • Make it faster, easier, and healthier tips
  • Make your recipe cards and shopping lists
  • Examples (my recipes and lists)


    • Note: Not about saving money
    This is not a money-saving system although I do save a bit of money by never wasting any food and always buying only what I need. You could probably figure some ways to save money - like cooking a whole chicken in the crockpot instead of more-expensive chicken breasts - but every time I tried something like this, the extra preparation time needed effectively negated the whole point of using this system.

    How Busy Meals got started
    The concept of Busy Meals was born a few months after my son. Those of you who have children understand how the birth of one child instantaneously both makes each day last forever (at least while they are still up around the clock), but also leaves only about 15 minutes of each day for housework and family meal planning.

    When my son was born I had to put an immediate stop to:

    • going to the grocery store 3 times a week
    • wasting time while at the grocery store
    • standing in front of the freezer thinking "what should we eat tonight"
    • eating out because I forgot to defrost something
    • throwing food like cheese and rolls away because I bought them for a meal I never made and then they went bad
    • buying food because it was on sale but not eating it because I didn't like whatever I made with it, or because I never figured out what to make with it
    • buying vegetables, putting them in the crisper, then finally getting around to cooking them a week later (or so) and finding them full of mold


      • If any of these sound like you, then keep reading!



    What the strategy does
    So, with much system-changing and recipe-trying, I came up with a system that organizes my dinners. Now, everyone in the family knows what is for dinner every day, sometimes for weeks at a time. I constantly have home-made meals in my freezer that can be on the table within 5 minutes of being fully-defrosted. I always have meals on hand that can be prepared in 5 to 10 minutes with no advance warning in case something comes up which means I won't have time to cook (which effectively eliminates the need for fast food or take-out).

    This is the concept of busy meals. It will take a while to get your system together, but imo, it's worth it.

    Basic Components of a Successful Busy Meals System


  • A list of meals that you feel comfortable eating over and over again

    • The list should be large enough for variety, all recipes should be within your comfort level in terms of health, you should already know your family likes all the meals, and no meals should be too complicated, or time-consuming.

  • Complete shopping Lists

    • You should make a shopping list that you can either copy or print out that has every needed ingredient for all the meals on your list for a certain amount of time (I shop three times during the course of my list of 42 meals). This list should be broken down by aisle to facilitate quick shopping trips.

  • Preparation
    Decide ahead of time which meals you will make on what day and always look at your calendar and list the day before so you can prepare by defrosting or getting out the crockpot if you need to.

  • Combining

    • Wherever possible, combine tasks - if you are already at the stove cooking beans for tonight's dinner, why not cook the rice for tomorrow's dinner? If your main course is rice with sausage you could actually cook and finish tomorrow's dinner and most of tomorrow's dishes in the same amount of time it takes you to cook today's dinner. Now, tomorrow night's dinner preparation only consists of: warm the rice and sausage and make a vegetable. Easy!

  • Make your list of meals
  • Set up your list and calendar
  • Make it faster, easier, and healthier tips
  • Make your recipe cards and shopping lists
  • Examples (my recipes and lists)


    • Saving Money in the Kitchen Article