Dinner Menu and Meal Prep for January

Welcome to the new year! One of the things I’ve been thinking about for the new year is how to get more organized in my menu planning and meal prep. Planning and prepping meals and ingredients in advance is one of the best things you can do to save time, save money, and ensure you provide healthy meals for your family. I’ve written about it here before and gave lots of tips and links to help you plan ahead. To help meet my goal, I’ve put together a January menu for my family and am sharing the first two weeks with you today. This is a Monday through Friday dinner menu, and I hope to share more of them with you throughout the year.

Week 1

One of the things to remember with menus is to view them as a framework for your meals. Why? Because life happens and you aren’t always able to prepare the meals you originally planned. Maybe you find you have more leftovers than anticipated from a meal, or things run late at work and you end up bringing takeout home for dinner. That’s okay. That’s reality. But if you have a basic plan in place, it will help you put a nourishing meal on the table more evenings than not. Feel free to use this menu as a basic plan and change things to fit your tastes, budget, and lifestyle.

Week 2

Along with the dinner menu, I’ve included meal prep ideas for the week. Most of them are  prep work you can do on Monday to help prepare for the rest of the week.

The menus are in pdf format for easy download and include links to recipes when available. Click on the following links for pdf’s of Dinner Menu and Meal Prep January 1 and Dinner Menu and Meal Prep January 8 menus.

Do you plan your meals and menus in advance? How has it helped you provide healthy meals for your family? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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Thank you for sharing!