Meal planning is something we only started this year, but as busy students it’s helped us so much! Our campus dining hall posts menus in advance, so each weekend we like to take a look at the upcoming week and decide when we want to eat on campus and when we want to cook for ourselves. We gather our favorite recipes, take stock of our dorm pantry, and figure out what meals we want to make that week and what groceries we need to pick up. Taking the time to plan in advance helps us stay mindful about what we eat, and going to the store with a plan in mind helps us avoid buying random ingredients. Read on for some of our tips to get started meal planning yourself!
Find recipes:
After we compare weekly schedules and decide when to cook together, the first step of our meal planning process is to figure out what we want to make. We’ve collected a handful of go-to recipes (many of which we’ve posted on this blog) so we usually pick a few of those, and maybe a couple new recipes to try. If you’re not sure what to make, pick an ingredient you like and search for recipes that use it. We like Pinterest because it suggests related recipes as well, but a simple Google search is enough to get started!
Making food with ingredients you like is an important part of choosing a recipe, but so is taking your kitchen space into account. There are dishes we like to cook at home that we can’t make at school, simply because we don’t have the space or the right appliances. Make sure you have all the necessary supplies for a recipe before buying ingredients!
Get ingredients – campus locations, grocery store, local markets:
Once we decide on the recipes we want to make, we have to figure out where to get our ingredients. Since we both have a school meal plan, we often get ingredients from campus dining locations – salad bars are great for picking up fresh veggies, and we can usually get fruit (apples, bananas, peaches) from our dining hall. Since we’ve already paid for our meal plan, getting ingredients on campus is usually more cost-effective than going to the grocery store. Another great option (if you have access to one) is a local market – if you have access to one, markets are a great place to check for in-season produce! However, some ingredients (such as pasta, grains, and beans) are best bought at a grocery store.
Keep price in mind when shopping! We are often on a super tight budget, so we buy a lot of store brands and dry ingredients (such as dried beans and rice) in order to save money. Another great way to save money is to use loyalty programs, apps (we like Ibotta), and coupons. This keeps the overall price down, and with Ibotta, you get to try new products AND save money.
How often you’re able to get to the store will influence what you buy, and it’s important to plan your meals around how often you can buy groceries. We usually go to the store every two weeks, so we tend to buy lots of canned beans and shelf stable food in order to last until we can go back to the store. However, if you can shop often, we recommend buying plenty of produce! We tend to use fresh produce from the store right away and save our shelf-stable food for later in the week, adding fruits and veggies from campus locations.
Use your recipes to make a list of all the ingredients you need and plan to only buy those at the store – don’t walk in without a plan, because you’ll probably end up buying random ingredients and it’s easy to waste money this way. We started using Google Sheets to meal plan, because it’s a free program and we can collaborate on the document, but a good old-fashioned piece of paper works just as well too!
We hope these tips helped spark some ideas for your own meal planning! Feel free to comment or get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions.
❤ Juliana and Sarah
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