How to make your meal plan work when you’re feeding a family
Meal planning for a family of any size can be a challenge because you need to have everyone’s specific needs and preferences in mind. With busy schedules and food allergies to worry about, your meal plan should help reduce the stress of how to feed your family. We support the freedom to choose the recipes that work for you and the serving size that matches the people you’re serving. Custom meal plans are the way to make meals work for everyone, no matter the size of your family!
Meal planners with families in mind can make the most out of their meal plans with the following tips:
1. Add Notes to the Planner to separate meals
If you’re preparing different meals for different family members, everything can start to run together and get confusing. We suggest adding Notes within mealtimes when you are planning multiple recipes, to separate and categorize them! This will allow you to remember who is eating what and perhaps who can help prepare which recipes.
2. Update recipe serving sizes
If you have a larger family, or simply like to have leftovers, you can increase the serving sizes of your planned recipes. Updating the serving sizes will automatically update the ingredient quantities for your recipes, so you buy the amounts you need. You can scale recipes from the Recipe Book, or on the Planner to adjust a recipe you’ve already planned.
3. Add tags to recipes
Tags in Plan to Eat act like folders or sub-categories for your recipes. When you’re meal planning for a family, tags are a great way to remember which recipes everyone liked or which were too spicy for the kids. You can customize your tags list to whatever meets your needs and then add them to recipes in bulk or one at a time. We love to add our family member’s names as tags and then add them to recipes that a specific person really enjoyed.
4. Custom shopping list categories
The Shopping List in Plan to Eat is completely customizable, which includes creating custom categories and stores. If you go grocery shopping with your family, it can be helpful to share your account with your family members and then create custom categories to specify who’s going to grab which items.
If you shop alone, you can also add notes to your shopping list items to know who items are for and what to buy based on each person’s preferences.
Life is stressful enough, your meal plan shouldn’t be adding to that. Organize, plan, and shop for your recipes, so you can get dinner ready faster and move on to other things!
