What is on the meal planner
- Seven days, four meals
- Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for Monday to Sunday. Lunch is often yesterday's dinner, which is why dinner and the next day's lunch are side by side.
- Grocery list by aisle
- Three columns: produce; meat, fish, dairy and eggs; pantry, frozen and other. Written in the order a supermarket is laid out, with a tick box per item.
- Eating out and events
- The nights you will not be cooking and the days with extra people. Written first so the plan is for the meals that will actually happen.
- Monthly dinner grid
- Five weeks by seven days of dinners only, with theme nights to make the decisions easier (Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Friday pizza).
- Servings, cost and cost per serving
- On the prep sheet. What a batch cost to make and what each portion works out at. Excel calculates it and totals the week against the budget.
- Prep day checklist
- The order to cook in so the oven, hob and chopping board are all busy at once and the whole week is done in two or three hours.
How to plan a week of meals in twenty minutes
Start with the calendar, not the recipes. Write in the nights you're out, the nights someone is home late, the days with guests. Those decide how many proper dinners you need. Then check the fridge and freezer and write down what has to be used up; that is the first dinner or two. Fill the remaining dinners from your usual rotation, with one new recipe at most, because new recipes take longer and need ingredients you do not have. Lunches are mostly leftovers, so plan dinners that make enough. Breakfast and snacks repeat all week.
As each meal goes on the plan, write its ingredients straight into the grocery columns. That's why the list is on the same page: a plan without a list means a second trip, and a list without a plan means a fridge of ingredients that do not make a meal. Check the pantry before you shop and tick off what you already have.
Weekly, monthly or prep sheet
- Weekly plan with grocery list: the one most households use every week. Four meals a day, list by aisle, budget at the top.
- Monthly dinner calendar: for people who find the weekly decision tiring and would rather do it once a month. Theme nights do half the work; the favourites list stops the month being 30 different recipes.
- Prep and budget sheet: for batch cooking on a Sunday. It costs each batch, works out the price per serving and compares the week's total with the budget. The checklist is the cooking order.
What meals cost per serving
The per-serving column on the prep sheet is where meal planning turns into money. A chicken curry that costs $14.80 for eight servings is $1.85 a plate; the same meal from a takeaway is $12 to $15. Most home-cooked dinners for a family land between $1.50 and $4.00 a serving in US supermarket prices in 2026, with fish and beef at the top of the range and beans, lentils, eggs and pasta at the bottom. Knowing the figure per serving makes the trade-offs clear: one salmon night a week is affordable if the rest of the week averages $2.00. The Excel version works out the average per serving across everything you prepped which is the number to watch from week to week.
Batch cooking on a prep day
Two to three hours on a Sunday afternoon can produce most of the week's lunches, two or three dinners and all the breakfasts. The order matters: anything that goes in the oven first (roast vegetables, a tray of chicken), grains and pasta on the hob while the oven is busy, raw vegetables chopped and bagged while things cook, sauces last. Portion into containers while the food is still warm, label each with the meal and the day, and freeze anything for Thursday onwards, because cooked food is best eaten within three to four days from the fridge. The checklist on the prep sheet is this order; tick as you go.
Editing the Word and Excel versions
The Excel prep sheet divides cost by servings per row, totals servings and cost, calculates the average per serving and compares with the budget you enter. The weekly and monthly planners have no formulas; in Excel they're grids you can copy from week to week which is convenient if your rotation repeats. In Word, rename the meals (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks to suit shift work), change the aisle headings to match your store, or type your standing items into the grocery list before printing. ODT and ODS versions open in LibreOffice and Google Docs.
Questions
Is the meal planner dated?
No. Write the week or month at the top. The weekly plan runs Monday to Sunday; the monthly grid has five weeks so any month fits.
Does the grocery list have set items?
No. It has three blank aisle columns with tick boxes, so you write the items the plan needs. Type your standing items into the Word version if you want them pre-printed.
Does the PDF calculate cost per serving?
No. The fillable PDF is for typing. The Excel and ODS versions of the prep sheet calculate cost per serving, the totals, the average and what is left of the budget.
How far ahead should I plan meals?
A week is the most common and matches a weekly shop. The monthly dinner calendar is for planning the dinners further ahead while still shopping weekly from it.
Can I use it for one person?
Yes. Set servings to 1 or 2 on the prep sheet; the per-serving figure still works. For one person, the prep sheet is often the most useful of the three because batch cooking is what makes cooking for one worthwhile.
