Menu Planning Tips for Busy Moms

Dinner is the last meal of the day and a time when families can get together and discuss their day. It is also a hectic meal for busy moms who are just getting off of work or who have been busy with other activities all day. If you are a busy mom or you know a busy mom, here are some menu planning tips to help make dinner meals easy and even fun.

1. Schedule your meals a week in advance. This is one of the most important planning tips for meals. Knowing what you are going to eat throughout the week means less chance that you will stop off at the closest fast food joint for a convenient, but unhealthy meal. Decide on the last day of the previous week (let’s say Saturday for the sake of argument) what the menu will be for the following week. Create your shopping list from the list of ingredients to avoid buying what you don’t need at the grocery store.

2. Look for bargains. Clip coupons, read advertising circulars and the like to decide where the best grocery to shop is for your menu items. If one ingredient is a common denominator in many meals, consider buying in bulk to save money. Common staples like milk, eggs, bread and sugar can be bought in bulk as well. Some stores will have double or triple coupon days when you can save even more.

3. Search online. After a while your family will get tired of chicken and rice every Thursday. You can get into a menu rut sometimes. Use the Internet to search for new and exciting recipes. Learn to put a twist on old recipes for a new taste. This is a great idea to look into menu plan memberships to liven your taste buds.

4. Have a leftover night. After preparing meals for five or six days, there is bound to be some food left over. Designate one night to be leftover night and let everyone mix and match for dinner. It saves mom from having to throw away any food.

5. Cook your meals in advance. After deciding on a menu plan for the week, go ahead and fix as many meals as you can. Choose a day when the entire family can help like Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. Each person can take one meal and fix it for the following week. Once everything has cooled, store it in sealed containers or casserole dishes to be frozen until the night it is needed.

6. Do prep work in advance. You may not be able to cook all your meals ahead and some foods just taste better freshly prepared. For them, do as much prep work in advance as you can. Enlist your kids to help chop (give them the kitchen shears instead) vegetables, dice cooked meat and mix together dry ingredients. The night of the meal, all that is needed is to add the wet ingredients and bake.

Meal time doesn’t have to be all on mom. The entire family can help with dinner so it is a relaxing meal for everyone.

Quick and Healthy Breakfast Ideas

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Unfortunately, many of us neglect breakfast.  And there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that your body and mind will suffer unless you have a healthy breakfast each morning.

You spend six to eight hours sleeping.  After that time, your body needs fuel to keep going.  Without breakfast at home, your options for on the run nutrition may amount to too much fat, too much sugar and too many carbs.  And, that convenient run to the fast food joint is not as convenient and time saving as you think if everyone else has the same idea.  The fifteen or twenty minutes spent in line could have been used to fill your belly with something good at home.

If you are the type to skip breakfast, here is a solution to starting the day with a good breakfast which will help you keep hunger in check as well as give you the natural energy boost to start your day.

1. Oatmeal – This food makes a good hot meal that contains lots of filling fiber to keep you from getting hungry later on in the morning.  Depending on your taste, you can take five minutes to fix it on the stove or use the microwave for instant oatmeal.  Kids tend to like the variety of flavors that come with instant oatmeal.  The night before, put together a container of add-ins like blueberries, strawberries and bananas that can be tossed on top for a bit of antioxidant power.

2. Fruit smoothies – These are good any morning but particularly on a hot day.  You’ll have to blend the ingredients together in the morning, but the prep work can be done at night.  Cube your fruit and place it into a container.  Instead of frozen yogurt in the morning, use a cup of plain yogurt.  Add ice cubes, a little water, a scoop of prptein powder and blend.

3. Egg sandwich – The eggs can be cooked the night before and placed in a sealed container.  In the morning, warm up the eggs in the microwave.  If you want, add some chopped veggies or shredded cheese.  Serve on toasted wheat bread.  The night before, place two pieces of bread into a Ziploc bag for each family member.  They can toast their bread as they get up and place the sandwich in the bag for easy transport in the car to work or school.

4. Yogurt with granola and fruit – Some people like to eat yogurt.  But, yogurt by itself won’t keep you from being hungry for long.  Add some granola and a few blueberries to the mix.  This makes a great breakfast idea for those mornings when you are running late.  Keep small bags of granola and blueberries in the fridge next to the yogurt so you can grab them and run.

Are you fighting the breakfast battle?  To get a filling meal you don’t have to opt for too much fat, calories or carbs.  These quick and easy breakfast ideas can be made within minutes and are a much healthier alternative to skipping breakfast or grabbing a high fat alternative.

Importance of Family Dinners

When was the last time you had dinner with your family? It is the meal we often skip because we work late, the kids have sporting events or we get tired from daily activities. But, skipping dinner with the family is detrimental to the family dynamic.

Family dinners are more than just a meal. It is about the only time that families have to share time through the week. Whether you sit down to the dinner table or enjoy a meal on tray tables and a movie in the family room, the important thing is that you are together.

There are some interesting facts surrounding family dinner time. For instance, teens that spend dinner time eating with their family are less likely to get involved in drugs, alcohol or other illicit activity. This is a point many parents will find interesting. Out of all of the things you do to try to keep your kids away from bad influences, the one thing that is the greatest influence is still the event that we skip routinely.

Why is dinner so important? For one thing, it is a time to share thoughts and feelings. All day, kids are influenced by teachers, friends and the outside world. At the dinner table, they get a chance to connect with their parents on tough issues like schoolwork, peer pressure, friendships and other things. They can each share and help one another with helpful suggestions. Parents can even talk about work or family finances over a meal.

The main point is that conversation is taking place. The average parent talks to their child less than 40 minutes a week. It takes a second to say “Hi” when you come in at night, but that isn’t effective communication. When dinner is shared by the family, you spend at least 45 minutes to an hour talking about everything and anything that may be on your mind. Even if you are watching a television program, engaging questions can arise from topics addressed in the program.

Young children learn how to communicate with their siblings and parents. They are the center of attention with questions about their day and it makes them feel happy. You know that kids always want to be in the limelight when they are a certain age and this helps them learn to share the spot with others.

For teenage girls, body image is everything. Learning to prepare and eat healthy meals with their families is a sign that eating right will keep their bodies in shape and not avoiding food. Teen girls are less likely to become the victim of an eating disorder and develop a healthy view of food and their bodies when they eat dinner with their families.

There are many benefits to eating dinner with the family. It is a time for meaningful communication that leads to stronger self-images that resist the urge of drugs, alcohol and other destructive behaviors in your kids and teens.

Meal Planning Is More Healthy

What is the easiest thing to do when you have had a long day and do not have any ideas about what you are having for dinner? Grab fast food or take-out. Not the healthiest option but you have no desire or energy to make anything.  You may not have the proper ingredients or cannot agree with the family on what to make. Now if you had your week planned out with all the meals this could have been avoided.

It’s reason number three that meal planning is something that you should do, it’s healthier. You can make recipes that are low fat, low carb, low sodium or anything else that is important to you and your family.  This can eliminate the quick fix, unhealthy meals.  You can also make bigger portions of the meals that you like and have leftovers during the week. When you are working late or busy doing errands late in the day you can still have something ready to heat up quick at home and not have to reach for the old standby of burgers, pizza or tacos.

If you like the food that you get at your favorite restaurant or burger place then look up copy cat recipes or healthier versions that you can remake at home. You can still get your fast food craving in, but with a healthy twist. You can add fresh fruits and veggies or salads instead of the fries and onion rings to off set the calories and fat.  There are plenty of recipes on the internet that have taken old favorites and made them over by lowering the fat and calories.  With a little planning you can have your burgers, fettuccini alfredo and even dessert. Your family will not miss the fast food and your children will learn how to make healthier food choices and that can only help them later in life.

Meal Planning Saves Time

We would all like our day to go a little more smoothly right? One way to make that happen is meal planning!

There are three main ways it can help any busy family out. Save you time, save you money and make you eat healthier. I think that everyone can appreciate all of those reasons.

We all want to save time right? Whether it’s spending time with your family, doing crafts you love, reading a book from your favorite author or just sitting and sipping some tea. Doing things you enjoy instead of being tied to the kitchen each night would be a huge win.

With meal planning you will never be wondering at 4pm what to make for dinner. The frantic “What can I make with what I have thawed” will be a thing of the past. You will print a plan for a week, 2 weeks or whatever is the best time frame for you and your family. Write the meals on a paper and stick it to the fridge so you know what you have in the freezer to serve each day. It will help to see what you are making that day and to map out what you need to have ready.

You take the shopping list for one trip to get everything you need to make the meals in the weeks menu plan. This cuts down on multiple shopping trips for ingredients that you did not know you needed and saves time. Knowing what you are having for dinner will save you in time searching for a last minute recipe in a book or online.  It saves you from having to scour the pantry and try to thaw frozen meat at the last minute and ruining the texture of the meat.

Just knowing what you need to do helps so you can plan your day around what needs to be done to get the meal on the table at dinnertime, or in many cases, you can ignore it completely as you know the meal will only take minutes to prepare

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