How to Create 5+ Meals and Snacks From Your Grocery List
With back to school in full swing, you’re probably starting to think about prepping family meals, kids lunches, and the time and planning that goes into them. While the summer months may offer a slower, more relaxed approach and pace to meals (although, maybe not!), the back-to-school rush usually picks up quickly as schedules fill and fall activities start.
Hence, we’ve put together a quick and easy grocery list for your shopping, with 5+ meal ideas (including breakfast, lunch, and dinner!) that you can make with ingredients from the list. You can also reuse many of these ingredients for other things. We obviously included some of our favorite sweetpotato recipes, while providing a nice variety of other vitamins, minerals, lean proteins, and healthy fats too!
What’s great about meal prep is that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If the idea of making 5 meals a week feels overwhelming, start with 2 or even 1. You can shop for your favorite produce items, bulk cook a grain or protein to last for some of the week or put together salad ideas for lunches. It can be as easy or extravagant as you want, but you want it to work for your family and lifestyle. There’s no right or wrong way to meal prep.
When thinking about grocery shopping, we like to break it down into different categories to make sure we have all of our nutrition bases covered, as such:
Protein options/meats – These may include things like meats and poultry, beans, lentils, seafood, dairy products, eggs, soy products as well as things like protein powder.
Pantry staples – Many of these are carbohydrate-rich options for your plate, such as sweetpotatoes, rice, pasta, grains, bread, tortillas, cereals, oats, and flours.
Produce – Of course, we want to load up on antioxidant-rich produce for our plates! If possible, shop by season, and buy different colors to brighten up your plates! Whether fresh, canned, or frozen, all fruits and vegetables provide health benefits, ample flavor, and a great way to amp up the fiber in your meal(s).
Fridge/Freezer – Some consumers prefer to further separate into foods that need to be refrigerated or frozen. This may include dairy products, eggs, frozen fruits and vegetables, convenience meals, etc.
Other – Things like salad dressings, sauces, desserts, packaged snacks, baked goods, etc. These may be things you purchase on an “as needed” basis vs. weekly.
Please note: This sample grocery list assumes that you have common pantry staples on hand, such as
cooking oils, butter, spices, honey, and/or maple syrup. Please remember that this will not work for every
family, and many families may need to purchase beyond this. This also doesn’t take into consideration
different dietary patterns (ie – gluten-free, vegan, low sodium, etc).
This is just meant to give some ideas and perspective on how to organize your grocery list to plan your
meals, and hopefully take some of the stress away from back-to-school meal prep.
Meals to Make
Breakfast
- Can substitute whole milk for the heavy cream unless purchasing heavy cream as well
- Use any choice of shredded cheese
2. Sweetpotato Blueberry Coconut Oatmeal
Topping ideas: Frozen berries, cinnamon, low fat greek yogurt, peanut butter
3. Scrambled eggs with spinach, fruit and toast
Lunch/Dinner
1. Leftover Sweetpotato Quiche
Can use kale or substitue any green vegetable you have on hand or family enjoys
3. Sheetpan Pork Chops and Sweetpotatoes – easy prep an clean. Most of the time is spent cooking in the oven.
4. Turkey Sandwiches with avocado and side salad (use spinach/kale, beans, bell pepper
Snacks
Sweetpotato Berry Smoothie
- can use kale/spinach or whatever you purchased for Mac and cheese casserole
- If you do not like coconut water, you can substitue any liquid in its place (milk, yogurt, juice, plain water)
Apple with string cheese
Banana with peanut butter
Hard boiled eggs with bell pepper slices
Greek yogurt parfait with fruit