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Weekly Meal Plan Free Printable
Beautiful Fall Design
With Free Fun Fall Stickers

Keeping up with my weekly meal plan with a beautiful fall design printable is how I am going to keep up this fall.🍁  School is in full swing, yard clean up, baseball games, & holiday planning; how am I going to keep up I keep asking myself. You may be asking yourself, how am I going to keep up with a job, kids, and fall activities? After putting all appointments in my phone calendar, my go-to answer to keeping my sanity is Weekly Dinner Meal Planning. 

Why do I spend my already hectic week on a weekly dinner written plan? Taking just 20 minutes on the weekend helps me keep my work, home, blog, and life balance. After a long day at work (whether at home or in an office), planning the dinner meal allows me to care for my family and keep my evening running smoothly.

Grab your free copy!

Having on hand all of your ingredients and your recipe where you can find it, speeds up dinner on the table. I want to spend my time when the whole family arrives home listening, talking, and building relationships, and having a preplanned week “sets the table” for me.

Once you get into the routine of a weekly meal plan it does not take much time at all. And the time you spend on Friday night or Sunday saves hours during the week. Even if at the last minute we go out to eat, the weekly meal plan gives me a quick reference for what to make the next night.

I usually print off my pretty weekly meal plan on Friday night when Jim & I have some downtime. We decide what we want to make on Sunday for dinner.  We pick a bigger meal, perhaps one that takes a little longer to cook but gives us 1 or 2 other dinner meals that week.  Whatever day you have 20 minutes of downtime on the weekend is perfect to set up a weekly meal plan.

Once you have a Sunday dinner meal pick then you can start making the rest of the week’s list and start a grocery list. Collect your recipes and check to see what ingredients you have in the pantry. I go to Pinterest to see if there is any beautiful recipe that looks good for my family to add to our family favorites.

I love to make family activities beautiful, so I design for each season a🍁 new free weekly meal plan printable that you can get for free.  Just send me your email by signing up here, and I will send it to your inbox with the password to the printable library.

I do not know about you, but if you are anything like I am,  I get bored with the everyday home tasks that I have to do each and every week.  Having a beautiful printable make all of the boring tasks fresh and new. And for me makes it special.

I like to grab a clipboard and pretty colored pens and sit with my favorite cup of coffee ☕️ and make the task special.  For fall I like to add stickers that inspire me or make me smile. I have also designed these cute fun fall stickers for you to download and print on sticker paper.

You will also find the stickers in the printable library and the password is on the way to your inbox by signing up here.

If you have the time on Sunday make one larger meal that will give you enough for a second dinner.  We will make a large pot of chili, or spaghetti sauce , a pan of lasagna, or two meatloaves. If you are going to have hamburgers on the grill, buy a large package of meat and form extra burgers, store them in individual zipper baggies, and put them in the freezer and you have your second meal.

Supplies You Will Need:

• Free Weekly Meal Plan Printable and stickers
• Printer, this is the one we have used for years
• Card Stock
• Printer Sticker Paper
• Beautiful Pens of different colors

If you have a Cricut Cutting Machine. You can find my tutorial on how to import the stickers into Design Space and have the Cricut do all the work.

We do not have to be Perfect

I feel the need to make sure you do not think, I think, I am perfect.  We see so many perfect plans, perfect homes, and perfect kids on Pinterest, I want to make sure you know that I am not perfect at dinners and I do not expect you to be either.

My suggestion to you to start a weekly meal plan is not to make you think this has to be one of those “perfect” ideas.  It is a tool to help you keep from being overwhelmed as a mom.  We all work, at home or away from home, and we all have the major responsibility of what our family eats.

It gets tiring and boring and overwhelming to be making these decisions week after week when all we want to do is sit down and cuddle with our families, laugh, and play and remind each other how much we love each other. Having a written plan is a way to make dinner planning off your “plate” at 5:30 at night and have it all planned out and ready to go.

If you do not follow your plan, as we all know life gets in the way, I give myself, and you, permission to just move on and save that meal for another day.

Dinner Suggestions

If you know me you know I like to say, “After work, make relationships with your family, not make a pile of dishes”. I have a lot of Electric Pressure Cooker recipes that take your hands away from the stove and allow you to let the pressure cooker do the work for you.  This lets you have time to spend with your husband or kids while dinner makes itself.

• Pressure Cooker Mac & Cheese
• Pressure Cooker Barbecue Chicken Sandwiches
• Pressure Cooker Corn Chowder
• Vegetarian Pasta Sauce in the pressure cooker
• Pressure Cooker Shredded Adobo Chicken Tacos
• Pressure Cooker Chicken Marsala
• Pressure Cooker Chicken Noodle Soup (with a Rotisserie Chicken)
• Pressure Cooker Red Beans & Rice
• Pressure Cooker Beef Stew
• Stuffed Green Peppers in the pressure cooker
• Chicken & Rice with Mushroom Soup in the pressure cooker

Steps to Start Your Meal Plan

• Print out your free meal plan printable
• BrainStorm main dishes from Pinterest, cookbooks, or favorite recipe cards.
• Look at your calendar to see what nights you will be home for dinner.
• Decide what will be for dinner for Sunday through Thursday.
• Pick 4 side dishes, salad, frozen vegetables in a bag for the microwave, baked beans, or ready-to-eat salad in a bag.
• Schedule each meal on a separate day.
• Look around to see what ingredients you have on hand in the pantry.
• Start wright down your grocery list of what you need.
• Remember you will be flexible and go with the flow, changing days for each dish as you need.
• Schedule on Monday & Tuesday foods that are fresh and not frozen so they do not spoil.
• Transfer your grocery list to your favorite app on your phone for quick reference when you are in the store.

I put recipes my phone in the Paprika Recipe app all of the recipes for each week.  That way when I am in the store I can double-check if I need any other items. You can find a full tutorial on Keystoinspriation.com by clicking here. 

Let me know if you have any tricks or tips on making your dinnertime less of a chore and more of a fun family time for love and laughter and time to pass on your unique life experience to your children.

~Susan