How To Build a 2-Week Grocery List and Meal Plan

Meal-planning is a great way to ensure that you use all the food you buy and that you never have to think about what you have to eat each night. 

Here’s how you can create a two-week meal plan and build a grocery list that has everything you need! 

How to build a two-week grocery list and meal plan

Set up your calendar

Before you start thinking about ingredients, cooking times or grocery shopping, it’s important to figure out your schedule for the next week, two weeks, three weeks or more that you’re wanting to plan for. This will accomplish a few vital things.

First, it will allow you to plan around your busy week, rather than the other way around. If you’ve got a dinner date with friends one night, jot that down. If you know that you’ll have a busy weekend and not much time to cook, then you will be able to plan an easier meal instead of a more complex one. Marking down dates and days of the week makes the meal-planning process so much easier because it allows you to support both your lifestyle and your meal-planning. 

Take this meal calendar and fill in the dates you’re looking to meal-plan for. Be sure to fill in any nights that you already know you won’t be cooking. Here's an example of how it looks!

Decide on a meal plan

A meal plan doesn’t have to be a strict dietary formula. In this case, your meal plan will reflect your goals for the next few weeks. 

Are you looking to clear out the miscellaneous items from your pantry? Great! If that is your plan, then creating your dinner schedule and grocery list will reflect those goals.

Are you looking to go vegan for a week, or do you already have a specific diet you’re following? Awesome! That’s also a meal plan! Having a specific diet or category of meals will make it easier to plan your next few weeks.

Feeling adventurous and want to try a random assortment of Pinterest finds? Perfect! That’s just as much of a meal plan as any. 

This is by no means a dietary suggestion or health recommendation. All this does is help you figure out what meals you’ll pick in the next few steps!

Pick your meals

Now’s the fun part! 

Before you go about assigning meals to certain days, think about what you’d like to cook. Do you want to cook something different each night? Do you want to have leftovers three times a week? Do you want to leave a few days blank for unexpected take-out nights? This will determine how many recipes you need to find and how much of each ingredient you’ll need to buy.

Use a recipe generator like Supercook or MyFridgeFood to find recipes that use the ingredients already in your pantry. These sites will also let you know what else you need to get to make any additional meals.  

If you have a Pinterest account, then keeping all your planned meals under a private board can make it easy to look at what you have planned for the week!

Now, add your meals to our handy-dandy meal planner list! Don’t feel like you’re locked into making each meal on the day it’s assigned. You can always switch out meals when you want! It’s just a guideline to help you if you need it!

See what you have

Oftentimes, we already have enough ingredients in our pantries and kitchens to make several full meals. We may not see the ingredients hiding in the corners or under the shelves, but a great deal of food waste is attributed to food expiring from lack of use. Over 25-50% of our waste in landfills comes from organic waste like food waste, and much of that comes from the fruits, vegetables and fresh foods that go bad before we eat them. 

Whether you’re looking to cook with whatever you already have or are following a specific meal plan, it’s worthwhile to take stock of what you already have to work with. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean making a list of every single item in your cupboards, but it does mean identifying some key ingredients.

Here are things to make note of:

• Canned goods (beans, beets, corn, soups etc.)
• Pasta and grains
• Frozen goods (fruit, vegetables, meat etc.)
• Dairy products (milk, yogurt, cheese, etc.)
• Seasoning mixes
• Sauces and marinades
• The things you bought because you’re definitely going to use them someday (that day is today)

By taking note of what you have, you can not just avoid buying double, but you can also prevent any food waste! It’s a win-win!

Write down the ingredients

Now that you know what recipes you’ll be using, you can start listing the ingredients you need for them.

After you’ve made a list of all the ingredients your recipes require, you can cross-reference it with what you already have in your kitchen. If you don’t have an ingredient, then add it to this grocery list! Make sure to account for recipes used multiple times during the week.

In the end

Although this process seems arduous, it will save you so much time in the kitchen every day. Now you will know that you have everything you need for each meal every single night, and you never have to spend hours browsing the internet for what to eat each night. This means fewer last-minute trips to the store, fewer expired foods thrown away and fewer nights spent resorting to take-out.

In the end, this is how your meal-planning and grocery-list-making process will go:

1. Build your calendar around your schedule
2. Decide on a rough meal category (random meals vs. specific diet)
3. Pick meals you want to make 
4. Write down ingredients you need
5. See what you already have
6. Add missing ingredients to a grocery list

And there you have it! This is an easy-peasy way to make two weeks’ worth of great meals with the least amount of stress! Once you try it, it gets easier and easier each time.

Enjoy!

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Featured photo courtesy Pixabay/Veganliftz