Meal Planning for Busy Moms
Meal planning can be one of the easiest ways for a family to save money – without or without couponing. And, dinner time can be one of the most stressful times of the day, especially when you find yourself in a busy season of life. That’s where a tool like emeals can come in handy.
Meal Planning for Busy Families
A subscription meal planning service, emeals can save you time and money. With multiple stores and meal plans to choose from, there is something for nearly everyone. There are, literally, a dozen meal plans to choose from, such as:
- Classic
- Low-fat
- Slow cooker
- Paleo
- Vegetarian
- Gluten free
- Clean eating
Not only that, but you can choose from eight specific grocery stores or a generic list for any other store. You’ll recognize some of the major grocery chains, including:
- Publix
- Whole Foods
- Kroger
- Safeway
- Aldi
Even Target and Walmart are on the list and you can further customize your meal plan by indicating your family size.
Each week, you’ll get an email with your meal plan for that week, including recipes, prep time, and a printable shopping list that you can take to the store with you. The meal plans include a main dish and side dishes. For an additional subscription price, you can even add breakfast and lunch menus and shopping lists.
Oh, and don’t worry about choosing a meal plan that you don’t like. You can change plans once a month, which means you can try a few or try them all until you find the one you like best.
Grocery Savings with emeals
Being able to choose your store not only makes shopping convenient, but, if you’re a coupon shopper, you can save even more by matching up your coupons with the sales and buy-one-get-one free offers listed in red on your emeals shopping list.
Even if you don’t use coupons, you can save money just by taking advantage of the specials emeals has discovered for you at your favorite store each week. Plus, I find that I save money any time I shop with a list just because I stay focused on what I need and don’t throw a bunch of unnecessary items in my shopping cart.
Try new recipes with emeals
Some of the recipes are for more classic dishes (on the classic meal plan, anyway), such as BBQ pork or shepherd’s pie. There are always some new (to me) recipes to try, as well, especially on some of the other meal plans.
Now, I’ll confess, I haven’t used emeals like I thought I would. I don’t just print off the recipe and head off to the store. I’m too set in my ways for that, I think. What I have been doing is saving all the emailed menus in a folder so that I can pull them out and get new recipe ideas for when I’m feeling stuck or in a rut.
Have you ever tried emeals? Do you think a subscription menu planning service would make your life simpler?
Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.
We have used emealz on several occasions, but never fully as intended. Often there would be just one or two recipes on the plan that I knew my family would not care for, so I had figure out which items on the grocery list could be deleted. I would have to plan a substitute meal for those times, and of course that added time and expended energy to using it. I find that it works for me if I just have a rotating schedule of weekly meal plans (including grocery lists) that work for us and just rotate those plans every two months or so. I also have a weekly plan for the holiday weeks and also for those weeks that we have guests in town. I use my Cook’n software for this. Meal planning is essential for saving time and money in our home.
I wish one of these sites would list all the recipes and then let YOU click on 7 of them and then create your personlized grocery list.
By the time you leave off and add to “their” plan, the beauty of it is gone. Printing the list and off you go is why it’s great.
I’d sign up in a second if you could do it like that. I subscribed for 3 months and by the time I took of fish recipes because my dh is allergic to fish and any nut recipes for allergic son, etc. I ended up like you-just using it for a recipe source.
That’s really a great idea. You should create it or partner with someone who can. I bet it’d be popular.
My Mom mentioned this to me a few weeks ago – she has tried the Wal Mart one and has liked it. I didn’t realize there were Paleo and Slow Cooker options, too…. cool!
I agree with the comments made previously…there were usually menus that my crew would not eat. I really like the idea of posting several choices and letting subscribers choose their weekly menu, I also previewed a new similar program: $5 Meal Mom. Same results. This plan was very heavy on Tex/Mex which we don’t eat al all!