Meal Planning for a Large Family with Plan to Eat

The beginning of another year has arrived. Unfortunately, I did not write here on the blog as much as I wish I did last year. Hopefully I do better this year. I guess it is sort of a goal for this year, but honestly I’m just too exhausted to set any goals right now. Maybe in another month? The last year, mostly the last several months have nearly depleted our entire home.

In an effort to regain some normalcy for our large family in a very busy, chaotic season of life, I’ve set out to update my home management systems and routines. The first of these systems I have updated is my meal planning routine. The actual planning system I had was fairly simple and working fine. You can check it out here. The grocery list and shopping wasn’t flowing very well though, especially since I switched to mostly doing pickup orders for our grocery shopping. It was just consuming too much of my time. As a mama of many, I needed to take back some of that time for other important tasks – like homeschooling 5 kids this year. Gulp.



I had a friend from our homeschool co-op who had mentioned she used Plan to Eat, but I didn’t know much about it. Back in November though, I finally signed up for their free trial. (FYI they always have the option on their site to sign up this way. No commitment. BUT it is very, very worth the $39/yr fee for this large family mama. No regrets.) Plan to Eat has been a game changer.

The actual planning and calendar layout is basically an online version of what I was doing before. I still print out the finished meal plan calendar and tape it up to the inside of my cabinet door. However, it saves me time and work in a few different ways. To put a meal on the calendar, you simply drag and drop it from a list on the side of your screen. As you are making your meal plan, Plan to Eat is compiling your grocery list from the recipes you choose! When you are finished, you can click over to the shop tab and edit, print, or check off your grocery list as you place an online grocery order.