 Hey guys, welcome back to Six Sisters Stuff on this Tip Tuesday. Today I'm going to talk about how to meal plan for you. It's Kristin, sister number two from Six Sisters Stuff, and on this Tip Tuesday I'm talking about meal planning and what will actually work for you. So I have these nine tips. There are some things I use and some things my sisters use, some things my mom uses, and so you really have to find what works for you. Number one, look at your calendar. Now I know that sounds pretty funny, but when you look at your calendar, you are able to tell, okay, this night is jam-packed with soccer games, gymnastics, piano lessons, whatever you have going on. If you have a busy night, you want to make that meal simple and easy, whether it's a slow cooker that you put in in the morning or a meal that only takes about 10 minutes to throw together. So number two is going to be have a list of your favorite recipes that you can pick and pull from. It will make your meal planning so much easier. So what we do in my house is that my husband has a running list on the inside of our pantry door. I know that's a funny place, but it won't get lost. So we've taped it onto the inside of my pantry door and he writes down all of his favorite recipes, recipes that I make that he likes. It's on there. Old recipes that we haven't had for a while, it's on there. That's kind of his special list and I know he will actually enjoy the food I'm making from that list. Now, number three kind of ties into number two and it is ask your family what they want to eat. So I went through and had my kids write down their 10 favorite recipes or favorite meals that they like to eat. And I kind of incorporated them into our meal planning list. So at least once a week, one child will like a recipe. So I kind of feel like it's a good thing that the whole family gets together in this meal planning. Number four, if you are still having a hard time deciding what to eat, what meals you want to eat, sometimes it's easy to do a themed night. So every Friday we actually do pizza. I have sisters who do taco Tuesdays. I have one sister who has a soup Saturday. It's just kind of an easy way to remember, okay, Tuesdays we're always gonna have this. Saturdays we're always gonna have this. And then it's just a matter of finding what recipes you want. When we were growing up, my mom had grocery day on Friday. It was just a set thing always on Friday. Every single Friday she was at the grocery store. So it taught me to kind of pick a day and decide, okay, this is the day I'm going shopping. I need to plan for this week. If you do not plan, you're gonna end up going to the grocery store three or four or seven days a week, which I know people do and that's great. But for meal planning, it's so much easier if you just had one shopping list, get it all done at once, and you're done for the rest of the week. You don't have to go back into the store and that way you'll save a ton of time. For me, I like to do everything on Sunday. I meal plan everything on Sunday, and then I go to the store or I do grocery pickup or grocery delivery on Monday. Number six, look for sales. Now, if you're one of those special people that get the ads in the mail every single week, I would maybe base your grocery list off of when your ad comes. For me, meat is usually pretty expensive. So I usually plan my meals off of what meat is on sale that week. So me and my family, we actually don't go out to eat very much, only special occasions like birthdays, that kind of stuff. But I only plan six meals a week because on the seventh day or Saturday or whatnot, it's kind of like our leftover day. I usually have enough meals to make it through. If I don't have any leftovers, it's usually our pancakes or a grilled cheese and soup or just something that I have sitting around in my pantry. So I only have to plan six days instead of seven and just plan on leftovers. Now with the leftovers, if you know it's going to be a really big meal, make sure that you put it in two days, like on Monday and Tuesday. One day's meal, one day's leftovers. That way, you won't have a ton of extra food by the end of the week. Number eight, check in your pantry and your fridge and your freezer. If you're like me, sometimes I spend my budget on something else. And so for that week, I need to make my budget for groceries a little bit less than normal. And that's when I dig through my stuff and come up with meals that I already have the majority of the ingredients for, making my grocery bill a lot smaller for the week. Number nine, the freezer is your friend. Now sometimes when meat goes on sale, let's say ground turkey for instance. Sometimes those huge rolls of ground turkey can go on sale. And so I like to purchase those, find a meal, cook all of that ground turkey and use a pound of it for my meal. And then the other two pounds I'm going to put in a Ziploc bag, put it in the freezer. Because then when it comes to making another meal, I'm going to have that ground turkey all ready to go, making my life so much easier. Also with the freezer, if I know next week's going to be really wild, I will double a recipe, a freezer friendly recipe, double a recipe, freeze half of it and then eat the other half for dinner that night. Number 10, if you have reached number 10 and you're still thinking, oh, this is still overwhelming. I still hate doing my menu plan. I have a solution for you. So as six sisters, we actually have our own menu plan and we have five different plans to choose from. One being our standard plan that feeds about six to eight people. Then we have a small standard plan, which feeds two to four people. Then we have our healthy menu plan, which again feeds about six to eight people. Our small healthy menu plan, it feeds two to four people. And then we also have a gluten-free plan. So in these plans, you actually get six dinners that will be sent to you, along with two side dishes and a dessert. So I'm just going to show you how easy it is to meal plan when something's already planned for you. Your shopping list is done. It is so easy. We have 10,000 people that actually use our meal plan and they love it. So I'm just going to show you all the recipes that we have. This is from last week, so I'm going to use the healthy menu plan. So we have our six main dishes, our two side dishes and our dessert. And they were delicious. So let me show you exactly what you get. Every Friday, you'll get this email. You click that to download the menu and there it is. So these are the recipes that were on this menu plan. The first one is Minestrone soup and my kids loved it. Second one was sesame beef and broccoli. This is black bean and corn enchiladas. And chicken broccoli quinoa casserole. This next one was so good. It's Italian stuffed zucchini. I think my kids' favorite was the slow cooker island pork roast. Now the two side dishes were the winter fruit salad and also the Italian fresh green salad. And for dessert was a healthy berry crisp. Now these other two pages are your shopping list. Everything is on there. I actually type mine into a computer so I used Kroger click list here. So then I could just go and pick it up when it was all ready. If you haven't shopped online yet, I highly suggest it. It makes your life so much easier. Now that was my total. It was $133 for six healthy meals for six to eight people. One thing about the healthy plan that I love is that you cook with a ton of vegetables. All right, here's some of my recipes. These are the enchiladas. This is the Hawaiian pork. This is the Minestrone soup. And of course, I couldn't leave out the dessert because it was good. I hope that this was helpful for you. Remember, there is no wrong or right way to meal plan. As long as you are trying, that's what really counts. I'll put a link in the description if you wanna try out the meal plan. We also have a code going on right now. If you use the code Facebook 20, all capitalization Facebook 20, you'll get an extra 20% off any menu plan. Now, if you haven't done it, be sure you subscribe to our channel and push that little bell so you can get all of our notifications when we post to YouTube. All right, guys, we'll see you later.