How a Weekly Menu Planner Saves Time in the Kitchen
A weekly menu planner is an inexpensive piece of software that, if used correctly, will yield benefits far beyond any other piece of home-based software you have. The menu planner is often overlooked as an essential piece of home-based software, but it delivers big benefits for a small price.
Bringing a little order to a chaotic kitchen
Most of us cooks are just a little bit chaotic in our approach to daily family meals, and that little bit of chaos can keep it fun. But too much chaos just brings disaster, wasted time and wasted money. Let’s look at an ordinary household kitchen, and what unplanned meals ultimately cause.
Without any planning, first of all, grocery shopping tends to be problematic. Shopping without a coherent weekly meal plan means that you may overbuy some items, fall short on others, and completely leave out key ingredients when you get to the checkout counter. The result? You spend too much money on things you probably don’t need, and you waste time because you have to take last-minute trips to the store when you realize what you’ve forgotten.
When you do get to the kitchen and start to prepare the family meal, without a plan, every day you have to ask the same question: “What can I cook today?” And of course, when you ask that question, everyone has an opinion, and those opinions are seldom the same. If you have a meal planner, the question doesn’t need to be asked, and you avoid the inevitable disputes and disappointments.
The shopping list feature
One of the best features of a weekly menu planner is the shopping list feature. This is a simple list that is generated by the software, based on the meals you have planned out. It gives you an easy, printable shopping list that makes sure you get everything you need when you go to the store. Nobody likes to have to run out at the last minute to get a single ingredient!
Dieting and calorie-counting
Another key feature of a weekly menu planner is how much it can help someone who is trying to adhere to a diet plan. Most of the menu planners can show key factors such as calories, or even amount of fats or nutritional values of each menu item.
Avoiding the Grandma Syndrome
Everybody knows this one. The traditional “old world” way of cooking was to make plenty of food, so there would be enough for unexpected guests, and plenty left over for later. Of course, Grandma would always encourage you to “eat, eat, bubela!” and she would be disappointed if you didn’t consume every bite of the huge portions she would bestow on you. What it all came down to though, is that Grandma always made too much food, and much to her dismay, much of it would go to waste.
The weekly menu planner helps to avoid that situation, simply by planning portions ahead of time and allowing you to prepare just the right amount.
The weekly menu planner can be indispensable. It’s no replacement for Grandma—but it certainly helps make the cooking go faster, and saves money at the supermarket at the same time.
Online Meal Planner makes your diet routine and saves money on your budget. A Weekly Meal Planner with Grocery List will organize your weekly dinner plans and help you free up time.