Blogs that Can Help You plan Family Meals

Planning family meals can be a real challenge, and selecting meals that everyone will like can turn into a difficult and time consuming process.  With kids being so active after school these days, it can be hard to find time to make dinner and get everyone fed at the same time.  You can use a number of tricks to help speed things up when it comes to getting on the table, however, allowing you to serve a hot meal in no time at all.  Even when you do have time, you likely want to cook something that is healthy, so having a few go-to places to find vegetarian recipes couldn’t hurt.  Sit back and relax while you take a look at the following 25 blogs that can help you form a plan to get dinner on the table quickly and efficiently.

Menu Planning

First things first, plan your menu.  Make sure to include some family favorites or a few pizza nights when you know things will be crazy.  Then, check out some of these blogs to find recipes that will help you get dinner on the table without a lot of work or fuss.  These five blog entries will give you different ideas on how to go about creating a menu, whether it’s just for the week or for the entire month.

• 5 Tips to Make Family Meal Planning Easier
• 6 Different Families, 5 Days of Dinners: Can One Meal Planning App Please Them All?
• Meal Planning Helps You Save Money
• Get Organized—How to Meal Plan…
• Menu Boards are Fun and Useful When Meal Planning

Slow Cooker

How would you like to come home after having a busy day at work or a day spent running after the kids and have dinner ready to eat?  This can be a reality when you use your slow cooker to cook dinner.  Depending on the meal that you choose, you may have a little more prep work to do in the morning, but you could even save time there by putting everything that will be going into the slow cooker in a gallon zipper type bag over the weekend and labeling it with the day of the week that you want to cook it.  Then in the morning all you have to do is wake up, dump it into the slow cooker, add some liquid, and you’re done.  No trouble at all and no dishes to worry about either.

• From Your Freezer to Your Family: Slow Cooker Freezer Recipes ECookbook
• 21 Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes
• Slow Cooker Meals, Bacon-Wrapped Potato Bites, Potluck Recipes & Kitchen Tricks
• Low-Cost Slow-Cooker Recipes
• Slow Cooker Freezer Meals: Make 8 Meals in 1 Hour!

Pressure Cooker

Do you have a pressure cooker?  If you don’t, you need to get one!  Pressure cookers cut cooking time by up to 75%, so if something would normally take an hour to cook, you can get it done in as little as 15 to 18 minutes.  You can have meals that you would normally reserve for weekends any night of the week with a pressure cooker.  They make stove top models or electric ones now.  These five blog posts will give you recipes that you can fix for your family in no time.

• Pressure Cooked Chickpea Curry with Brown Rice (One Pot Meal)
• Fast Food Redefined
• Pressure Cooker Beef Bourguignon
• Pressure Cooker Sirloin Tips in Gravy
• Pressure Cooker Split Pea Soup with Ham

Freezer Meals

Making your meals for the week or for the month all in one day may seem like a ridiculous notion, but it isn’t.  Many families handle their dinners like this every month.  Making food ahead and throwing it in the freezer is a time saver because all you have to do is pull it out of the freezer and cook it.  This method also allows you to save money because you can take advantage of buying ingredients in bulk, which is often cheaper.  Here are five blog articles that will explain how to make meals ahead of time for your freezer.

• Make-Ahead Freezer Meals
• Make-Ahead Meals
• Dinner in the Freezer: Make-Ahead Meals!
• Stocking the Freezer- Make Ahead Meals
• Tasks You Can Do Right Now to Help You Get Started With Make Ahead and Freezer Cooking

Vegetarian

It seems like many people are going vegetarian or are trying to eat vegetarian once a week to improve their health.  Vegetarian meals are less expensive to make because the expensive meat is missing from the dish.  See if any of these five blog recipes inspire you to eat vegetarian every now and then.

• 7 Cheap and Easy Vegetarian Meals
• White Beans: Simple Vegetarian Suppers
• 8 Wholesome Vegetarian Meals for Autumn
• Adaptable Vegetarian Recipes
• Vegetarian Spinach and Mushroom Lasagna

Source: (http://www.becomeananny.org/blog/25-blogs-that-can-help-you-plan-family-meals/)