Meal Planning: Expert Guides and Resources

The secret to great meals is in the planning. The truth is, many people think they hate to cook when they just haven’t figured out how to plan what to cook. When you plan your dinner menus ahead of time, you eat healthier, save money, reduce stress, and enjoy delicious meals.This Cheat Sheet provides a quick reference to the benefits and basics of meal planning.

When you’re on top of meal prep, you need to know how to keep your veggies fresh — having to run out to the store at the last minute is the opposite of prepared. Meal prep is all about making meals in advance, so you need to know how to use the freezer to your advantage. If you want to be a meal-prep pro, you need expert hacks that’ll make your life simpler, as well as advice on how to shop successfully.

You can tap into many resources when it comes to planning meals for your baby or toddler. Babies younger than 2 years old have some special dietary don’ts you need to know about. For recommendations on the types of foods young children should eat, you can consult the food pyramid compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Grocery shopping for the ingredients for healthful meals for your baby or toddler isn’t the easiest task. The following list contains perishable and nonperishable foods you’ll want to have on hand, so you can take care of the essentials in one fell swoop. Don’t serve the foods with stars to kids under age 1. For two stars, wait until age 2.

Many food items go on sale at regular times from year to year. Throughout the year, various food items are seasonally offered at discounts. For example, March is National Frozen Food Month in the United States, and to celebrate this prestigious event, most grocery stores offer significant discounts on frozen foods during the month.

If you only know Imperial measurements (like cups and quarts), but your recipe is in metric, don’t panic. These tables show you a variety of metric conversations: volume, weight, size, and temperature. Use these metric-conversion tables if you need to convert a recipe. These conversions are approximate, so results could vary.

Depending on the food you’re serving, you may find one wine suits better than another. Pairing foods with wines the right way can make a meal wonderful or a waste. Here are a few ideas about which wines complement particular foods: Easy-to-drink, lighter red wines: Go well with meat, poultry, and oily fish like salmon.

Dinner can often be a bit of a challenge for children who are 18-months to 2-years-old. Kids that tend to eat an afternoon snack are often uninterested in dinner, but the delicious recipes below help alleviate that problem. Naturally, dinner is the last meal of the day, providing balanced nutrition for your child before he goes off to sleep, so it's important to work with your child to establish a pattern of healthy meals and healthy snacks.