Family Meal Planning 101: Getting to the Dinner Table with Dinner on the Table → A More Beautiful Life Collective

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Family Meal Times are so beneficial for you and your family. Research shows that consistent family meal times result be better spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, and relational health. But, how do we consistently get our families to the table with yummy food to eat? This post dives into the basics of Family Meal Planning to help you cultivate this vital part of your day.

S2E29 – How to Celebrate Lent as a Protestant – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

The season of Lent is a time in the Church Calendar to observe a period of preparation before the joyous season of Easter. Lent reminds us of the beauty of self-denial and obedience as we await our future resurrection. Today, we'll talk about how to celebrate Lent as a Protestant. This is a beautiful tradition that deserves a place in your year!Read more at the blog post: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/how-to-celebrate-lent-as-a-protestant/ Get our 1 page guide to Lent here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.kit.com/e3a84b5a60 Get the Celebrating the Church Calendar Guide here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/church-calendar-guide-a-pdf-guide-to-all-the-seasons-of-the-liturgical-year/ …Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you canlearn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast,A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen onSpotify orApple Podcasts, or watch onYouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. Want to support A More Beautiful Life Collective in the creation of podcasts, posts, and other resources? You can make a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation here. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources atA More Beautiful Life Collective Shop.Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Hey everyone and welcome to Season 2 Episode 31! Today, we are diving into a topic that is super practical for everyone. Everyone has to eat, but getting food on the table can be a challenge. We’re going to focus on mealtime routines – planning, prepping, and getting to the table – that will help you save money, eat better, and be more connected with your family. This episode will cover all the basics of family meal planning.

When I was first married, I remember the struggle of family meal planning. Granted, I was living in a construction zone as we renovated my husband’s childhood home. We didn’t have a kitchen and had to cook off a hot pad on our dryer and wash our dishes in a utility sink in the bathroom.

Needless to say, it was not ideal.

As a child and teenager, I truly did like to cook and bake. Some of my fondest memories were baking chocolate chip cookies at my grandmother’s house and eating them as part of our tea parties. I tackled recipes like cheesecake and mushroom hors-doeuvres. So theoretically I should have known how to cook for myself right?

Well, there’s a big difference between making special recipes as a hobby and being able to put dinner on the table for every meal every day. And, there’s an even bigger difference between making special treats every now and then and making most of your food from scratch. Family Meal Planning requires special skills that you have to learn – it doesn’t just come naturally!

For a few years, I got away with simple meals of pasta and fast food. But, as my family grew, so did my need to know how to cook and what to cook. As I’ve gotten older (and as I moved into a house that had a finished kitchen), my ability to get food on the table grew as well.

Today, I’ll share with you a few tips that I’ve learned over the years on how to get healthy food on the table cheaply, and I’ll also share the system that helps me do that. You can get your own version of the system yourself at the shop. Our Family Cookbook is my meal planning binder that helps me cook almost all my food at home with minimal prep work. Family Meal Planning is a breeze now. If you are looking for a Family Meal Planning System, get your copy today.

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Benefits of Family Meal Times

Everyone has to eat. It is part of the way God made us. In our episode on Discipling Our Children through Family Meal Times, we talked about how eating cultivates our soul in the following ways:

Eating cultivates a sense of presence between us and those around us.
Eating cultivates a sense of dependence on God.
Eating cultivates a sense of dependence on each other.
Eating cultivates our sense of dependence on creation.

As we come to the table daily, we are reminded of our need for our spiritual daily bread. Eating reminds us that we are mortal. But that’s not all.

When we add the dinner table to the equation, we add a whole extra dimension to our daily meal. As we sit down with each other, we stop the frenetic movement that characterizes our lives and pause to connect over a shared experience.

Unfortunately, this is now a counter-cultural experience. According to the American Survey Center, “Far fewer Americans report having regular meals with their family during their formative years. Baby Boomers were far more likely to have grown up having meals with their families than Millennials and Gen Zers. Only 38 percent of Gen Zers who are now adults report that their family ate together regularly growing up.” The results of the survey fall along class lines families whose adults have higher education more frequently eat meals together at the dinner table.

Why is Family Dinner Time important? We live busy lives now. Yes, sometimes screens are keeping us from the dinner table – as was my experience as a young wife. But, other times it’s sports and other activities. Or maybe we simply get home late from work. Why should we make the time to get to the dinner table?

The Family Dinner Project has scoured research and found the following benefits for children and adults of regular family meal times at the dinner table:

Better academic performance
Higher self-esteem
Greater sense of resilience
Lower risk of substance abuse
Lower risk of teen pregnancy
Lower risk of depression
Lower likelihood of developing eating disorders
Lower rates of obesity
Better cardiovascular health in teens
Bigger vocabulary in preschoolers
Healthier eating patterns in young adults
Better nutrition with more fruits and vegetables and less fast food
Less dieting
Increased self-esteem
Lower risk of depression

Importantly, Family Meal Times also helps us to have a built-in habit of connecting with our children. We can use (or misuse) this time however we want. But, as Christians, this is a crucial time for ‘training up our children in the way that they should go.’ Often, this is the time to connect with our kids and pass on our faith, traditions, and values.

As Don Everts states in The Spiritually Vibrant Home, we need loud tables in our home if we desire for our children to have a vibrant faith.

The Struggle of Family Meal Planning

Family Dinners are important. They simply lead to healthier lives for the people in our homes – spiritually, physically, emotionally, and relationally.

But, how do we consistently get to the table with food on the table?

By doing Family Meal Planning.

And that’s not all. Family Meal Planning needs to become a habit. We need to make our Family Meal Planning run on autopilot. We shouldn’t be stressing about the little decisions that come with getting to the dinner table each day. Instead, we should make planning, prepping, and cooking a habit in our homes. It needs to become a regular part of our Evening Routine.

I’ll give you three tips for making that happen in your home.

Family Meal Planning 101: Getting to the Dinner Table with Dinner on the Table

Make a Rotating Meal Plan
Create some basic cooking and cleaning habits
Set rhythms for the dinner table

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Make a Meal Plan

Recently, I saw someone posting about the mental ‘load’ – or fatigue – that comes with family meal planning. Picking the meals, grocery shopping, prepping, and cooking the meals is a hefty chore. (They said that making the spouse pick all the meals was ‘weaponized passivity.’ I don’t know about that.)

Yes, planning, cooking, and cleaning can be a lot. But truly, it shouldn’t be something that requires a lot of effort. Getting our dinner on the table each night should run on autopilot. Just like your morning routine and your evening routine should happen without a lot of thought, your meal planning should function the same way.

Decision fatigue is a real problem that can lead to feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and acting in impulsive ways. So, after a hard day at work or home with the kids, if we then have to go and figure out what to cook, if we have the ingredients and time, and when to eat, we’ll probably end up swinging through the drive-thru and eating in front of the TV.

What’s the solution? Make a meal plan!

Family Meal Planning should be a simple weekly routine of planning out your meals, shopping your pantry, grocery shopping, and meal prepping so that your kitchen runs on autopilot throughout the week.

Meal planning leads to several benefits according to this study:

Meal Planning leads to healthier meals
Meal Planning leads to higher overall food variety
Meal Planning leads to healthier weights in men and women

In addition to these health benefits, family meal planning will also save you time and money by limiting trips to the store and drive-thru throughout the week.

Week-By-Week Meal Plan

Now, there are two methods of family meal planning. The first is to choose new meals each week based on your mood and make a grocery list. This method can take more time and money than the second method because you have to find new recipes, make a new grocery list, and potentially buy specialty items each week for recipes.

When you first start meal planning, you will need to use this method for some time to figure out the types of meals that you like. When I first started meal planning in earnest, I used an app on my phone, called Mealime, that had a list of recipes to choose from. It would automatically make my grocery list (and connect with Instacart for grocery shopping). Then, it had a cook mode with timers for when I was making the recipe. I honestly learned so much about cooking through using that app regularly.

After I used Mealime for a while, I then switched to the Passionate Penny Pincher meal planning cards. These menu plans are simple, healthy, affordable, and kid-friendly. I was still choosing new meals each week, but I started figuring out my favorites.

Rotating Meal Plan

After you’ve learned some basic cooking skills and have figured out some recipes that are ‘tried and true,’ I would switch to the second type of family meal planning which is a Rotating Meal Plan.

While researching for this podcast, I came across someone who said that they were regularly spending 1-2 hours on their meal plans each week. How can we streamline meal planning? Rotating Meal Plans can save you even more time and money by helping put your kitchen routines on autopilot.

A Rotating Meal Plan is simply a series of meal plans that rotates over some time. You can set it up as a series of 4 weeks or even 4 months (or anywhere in between). I’ve landed at rotating through meal plans every two months, and grocery shopping every 2-3 weeks.

How do you set up a Rotating Meal Plan?

Step 1. Figure out a Rhythm for Your Week. I like to assign certain types of meals to certain days. Right now, I do Soup and Bread on Mondays, Mexican on Tuesdays, a Church Dinner on Wednesdays, Around the World Night on Thursdays, Homemade Pizza on Fridays, and Grilling Out on Saturdays – with Sundays being a ‘catch-up’ day to use up whatever we didn’t to each week. I also do the same type of meal every day for Breakfast and Lunch which requires minimal prep. Breakfast is oatmeal and fruit (except for a special breakfast on Saturdays), and lunch is leftovers or sandwiches.
Step 2. Make a master list of recipes that fit your nightly themes. Involve your family and think about all the recipes you would like to make.
Step 3. Choose recipes from the master list and print them out. Put them in a binder and organize them in the order they appear in your meal plan. I also label my recipes with the day and week they appear in my meal plan just in case I need to take them out of my binder. I recommend creating four meal plans, but the length can vary depending on how often you want to repeat meals. Because I have biweekly meal plans, I repeat meals every two months.
Step 4. Create a master grocery list with ingredients for your recipes. I include staples that I always like to have on hand – like butter and brown sugar. I also include a few ‘fall back’ meals like spaghetti and frozen pizza that I can have on nights when I don’t feel like cooking. Smart buying like this can also help me to stretch my meal plans for longer.

Then, you just have to follow it! Here are some tips to get the most out of your rotating meal plans:

Plan to use up food that spoils quickly right after you go to the grocery store.
Freeze meat, bread, and other items right after you go to the grocery store and pull out the meat you are going to use the night before.
Be sure to shop your pantry when doing your grocery run while using your master grocery list.
Your meal plans are flexible and work with your schedule. If you find that you haven’t made several of your meals, your meal plan can stretch for longer than you had originally planned.

Would you like to get your own copy of this Meal Planning Binder to start making more healthy meals at home? Get Our Family Cookbook in the shop. You’ll get a guide for creating a meal plan along with what you need to set up your binder.

Visit A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop for bible studies, planners, and other resources.

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Create some basic cooking and cleaning habits.

Meal Planning goes a long way to making sure that you can get food on the table. If you meal plan, you have your recipes, ingredients, and meals chosen for you. Now you just have to cook!

Here are three tips for developing some cooking and cleaning basics in your home.

Tip #1: Learn how to cook from scratch.

At the beginning of your journey in the kitchen, you may rely on box mixes and lots of prepackaged food. Over time though, you’ll a master of the recipes included in your rotations. You can tweak them as needed, and maybe replace them with better versions.

You may begin to realize you can make lots of prepackaged foods from scratch with little effort. Things like Taco Seasoning and Dressings can be made cheaper and healthier from scratch and all that’s required is a little measuring and mixing. You may even decide to make more and more from scratch as you work to make healthier decisions like your food. Making things like bread and even pasta is simpler than you think. It mostly just requires the time to learn how to make it!

Tip #2: Foster daily cleaning habits.

As you gain confidence in the kitchen, one of the things that will help you to consistently have family meals is your daily homemaking habits. It’s always frustrating to try and cook with a messy kitchen, and nothing worse than heading to cook your meal for the night only to realize that you should have put it in the crock pot eight hours ago.

This daily and weekly checklist will help you to have a clean kitchen (and a clean home). The most helpful daily cleaning habits are:

In the morning, unload your dishwasher
Check your meal plan while making breakfast and prep any meals
Clear your counters
Then in the evening after you eat, start your dishwasher
Wash your dishes
Wipe down counters
Check your meal plan and pull out any frozen items.

These little habits will go a long way toward making your home run on auto-pilot.

Tip #2: Involve your family.

Time is always in short supply in our busy days. Don’t let the lack of time keep you from Family Meal Times. The best way to make sure you regularly eat dinner is to make the cooking and cleaning a family affair. If your family is eating it, they should be helping you with it.

Including your children in the kitchen chores can help build valuable life skills that adults today wish they had. The things that are struggles for you now – grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning – are all things that if you teach your children at a young age will just be habits ingrained in their life. Your kids will reap the rewards of your hard work now.

Toddlers can unload the dishwasher, set the table, and clear their plates. Children can cut vegetables and learn cooking basics. Pre-teens can make grocery lists and simple recipes. Teenagers can take over a majority of meal planning tasks. (In fact, in my husband’s family, the oldest child took responsibility for making dinner for the last two years at home.)

You can get a daily routine chore chart printable for your kids in the shop.

Set Rhythms for the Dinner Table

After you’ve made a Rotating Meal Plan and fostered some cooking and cleaning habits, your kitchen is probably running fairly smoothly. But, it doesn’t matter if you’ve made a 5-star gourmet meal if no one is at your dinner table to share it with.

Our meal times are important not because of the food, but because they offer time for us to connect with our families. Our Family Meal Times should be the key time in our day for discipleship.

So how do we make sure we get to the dinner table and steward that time wisely?

Set a time for family meal times each day. This time should be consistent throughout the week. For the most part, if your family is home, it should be a non-negotiable to meet at the dinner table with you.
Limit the devices. Family meal times should be about connection. Cultivate connection by banning devices – like TV and phones – that inhibit conversation.
Start Family Meal Times with a ritual. Light a candle. Say a prayer. Do something that sets the stage for your meal times.
Strike up conversations. Try out conversation starters like ‘favorite things’ to help start conversations. The more you talk, the more opportunities for discipleship.
Use family meal times for discipleship. Read a family devotional book or bible study during this time. Read aloud from a novel and talk about what you learn.
Create a life-giving atmosphere at the family table. The way your dinner table feels can be just as important as the food you make or the conversations you have. Think about the atmosphere of your kitchen created through the sights, smells, and sounds you cultivate.

A little bit of planning and intentionality can go a long way toward making Family Meal Times something life-giving and legacy-building.

Do you want to create a vision for your home? Get our Family Vision Workbook on the shop. You can also listen to our episode on home and homemaking here.