Meal Planning: Real Strategies from Real Households

This week’s episode of Ms the Word tackles one of the most universally exhausting parts of family life: figuring out what’s for dinner. The panel compared notes on how they actually handle meal planning — from full structure to happy chaos.

Quickfire: Wing It or Plan It?

The panel split down the middle — one full-time “winger,” one recent convert to planning, one who plans and delegates, and one who’s simply opted out of cooking altogether.

Approach 1: The Freezer-and-Improvise Method

One panellist keeps a fully stocked freezer and figures out dinner on the day — batch cooking on Sundays for herself, then “cobbling something together” for the kids from whatever’s in stock. Her philosophy: “The art of being spontaneous is to be prepared.”

Approach 2: Loose Structure + Delivery Support

Another panellist uses the family calendar to jot down a basic meal plan so shopping and cooking stay coordinated. Two nights a week rely on a frozen meal delivery service the whole family enjoys — easy to portion, quick to heat, and genuinely well-liked by everyone. The rest of the week rotates through chicken, salmon, and mince-based meals, with weekends left more flexible.

Approach 3: Delegated Cooking

One panellist’s partner handles all the shopping and cooking, a dynamic that developed naturally after their first child and simply stuck. She still gives input and occasional feedback, but has “no control” over what shows up for dinner — and she’s completely fine with that.

Approach 4: The Repeating Weekly Menu

The most structured approach: an identical weekly menu — spaghetti bolognese on Mondays, chicken katsu on Tuesdays, and so on — that runs for a few months before being refreshed. The appeal is obvious: no daily decision fatigue, and consistency for the kids, especially useful around changing childcare or after-school schedules. Lunches follow the same “phase” pattern until she’s ready for a change.

The Real Talk: Mismatched Mealtimes and Dinner Drama

The panel got honest about the chaos of modern family mealtimes — kids eating earlier than parents, dinners creeping to 9:30pm, and the classic dinnertime drama where a kid rejects a meal, only to end up loving it once they actually try it. One panellist recalled her own mum making a different meal for every family member — a level of catering she now looks back on with a mix of guilt and gratitude.

Practical Tips for Anyone Feeling Overwhelmed

In response to a viewer feeling burnt out by the mental load of meal planning, the panel offered:

• Use a frozen meal subscription or rotation to cut decision fatigue and reduce food waste
• Delegate. It doesn’t all have to be one person’s job
• Get the kids involved in choosing meals — one panellist’s 12-year-old found a recipe on Pinterest that’s now a family staple
• Let kids help cook, even in small ways. Kids are far more likely to eat something they’ve had a hand in making — even something as simple as toddlers “helping” crack an egg
• Take inspiration from cooking shows or channels aimed at family-friendly meals

The Bottom Line

There’s no single right way to meal plan — full structure, loose planning, delegation, or a well-stocked freezer can all work. The common thread across every approach: reducing the daily mental load of “what’s for dinner” frees up energy for everything else.

What’s your meal planning method?

Transcript:

Welcome back to Ms the Word. And today, this might just be the most practical episode we’ve got planned for you — that’s if the four of us can offer you some value. That is: meal planning.

Now, if you’re anything like me, meal planning is one of the hardest things as a mum — constantly thinking about what can we give them for dinner, what are we cooking this week, there’s got to be an easier way. So we’re going to talk about that today, and hopefully you can walk away with some good tips and maybe even some meal ideas. That’s what I’m hoping for. Right, team? Meal planning.

Firstly, quickfire — do you wing it or do you plan it? Come on, wing it. I’ve been winging it for years, I’m starting to have some sort of plan. I don’t wing or plan because I don’t cook. I plan. Okay, we’ve got it all covered here. So let’s talk about it.

You don’t wing it — so what are you having for dinner tonight, you and the kids? Oh, actually, I did make some food for me, because I’m trying to be on a more mindful exercise and food regime. So I did do some batch cooking yesterday, which I do quite a lot on a Sunday when I’ve got the time, to make up a big vat of something and that will last me through a few days in the week. But as for the children, I have no idea — whatever I have in my freezer this evening. What if there’s nothing in your freezer? Oh, my freezer is always full. Okay, so the art of being spontaneous is to be prepared. I do have a lot of stuff all the time, but I genuinely don’t know what’s in there right now, and I will cobble something together when I get home.

And can it all be cooked from frozen? Yeah. I think anything can be cooked from frozen. It has to be defrosted if it’s meat. No, I don’t think it can — I am the person that reads the labels. Oh, I don’t worry about that, honestly, I’m not eating it, it just goes in the oven. I’ve been living like that for most of my life. Um, apart from — my husband and I did go through a time of batch cooking on a Wednesday and a Sunday, and that was really good, but I haven’t come back to it, because it takes a bit of effort to start with — you’ve got to get the shopping right. But actually it was really easy once we got into it, because it was like 30 minutes and you could make a number of meals. So I should come back to that.

But what I’m doing at the moment is just — on the family calendar, which is new for my house, would you believe — I’ve started to write the basic base of the food, so I know to buy it in the shop, and then whoever’s doing the cooking between us will know that’s what we’re having. And two nights a week we have something from a company called Stocked, who deliver frozen, beautiful meals — they’re lovely, they’re in these frozen blocks, and there’s eight of them, so you can really portion control if you need to. And all of the family like them, every single person in the family likes them. So you heat them up in a saucepan, takes 10 minutes, and you add rice or pasta or whatever — you add the carb, and they’re really wholesome, they’ve got the meat in there, and there’s actually a good amount of meat — believe me, Paul would say if there wasn’t enough protein in it. So it’s a good amount, and we’re all really enjoying them. We’re choosing the two nights a week where there’s quite a lot of clubs to have a Stocked night, and then the others will be kind of a rotation of something chicken-based, something salmon-based, something mince-based — there might be a weekend where it’s a bit more of a frozen dinner, and then Sundays will be whatever we creatively decide to do. That’s kind of our — I’d say a loose, planned wing.

Okay, bit of structure. I was just going to come to you — does your partner cook for you, does the shopping? Does he cook the same thing every week, or do you know what’s coming? I give my opinion sometimes, I’ll be like, “Oh, I didn’t really like that, can we do something different next week?” Yeah, he does the shopping, he does the cooking, and breakfast and lunch I’ll make my own breakfast. Sometimes even hard-boiled eggs, whatever I have. When we make the kids’ breakfast — but lunch or dinner, I’ve got no control. So I will go home tonight, I’ll probably call in the car, “I go for dinner.” We try and keep it as healthy as we can for the kids, because I was brought up on a very beige diet, I’ve got a beige palette — which I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, but I’ve still got that beige palette at 32, so I’d like to give the kids a bit more variety. But yeah, I’ve got no idea — if Matt goes out for the day and I’m working, he will make me a sandwich.

Can we cook, do you just choose? Yeah, I can. So it basically came about because when I had my first, he wasn’t hands-on with my first, and I did everything in the house and with the baby at the time. So he started to cook, and I was like, “Great, that’s your job.” I just never let him drop it, because I was like, that’s his balance — he’s 100% balanced, because I do a lot over here, it’s probably still not quite balanced, but that’s fine. But he does all the cooking and the shopping. So yeah, I’m so grateful, because I can cook, and I’ll cook the same things, and nine times out of 10 the kids will eat mine over here, and he’s like, “Oh, you might as well,” “No, no, I’d rather them have his.” I’m not going to cook — just to clarify, my husband does take on quite a lot of the cooking, but it’s not been discussed, it’s kind of whoever gets there first — he’s always hungrier before me. He eats a lot, so he’ll — and he likes it — and I can cook too, but it often works out that I’m doing the entertaining-the-children part while he’s cooking, and then we’ll eat together. So it’s not a role that’s been planned out, it just happens that he probably cooks more often than I do, and if he wasn’t there, obviously I’d do it.

It’s not going to surprise you that I am a bit routine about meals — as in, we eat the same meals on the same nights every week until we’re utterly sick of them, and then the menu will change. So the menu will last a few months, and then it’ll change. Every Monday — I will tell you — Monday: spaghetti bolognese. Tuesday: chicken katsu, like fresh chicken katsu. Wednesday: me and John have salmon and rice, kids have stir fry, because we have different schedules and they don’t like salmon. Thursday: chilli. Friday: fajitas. Saturday: probably mince parcels at the moment — the Saturday might change over time. And then Sundays will be something different, like burgers or a roast dinner. And it’s the same every week, so I know exactly what we’re having. And because we’ve been looking at different childcare options — different topic altogether — but one of the things we’ve never had support with is mealtime, and they’re here now after school, so it was important that we planned so we can really maximise on that and keep consistency. But also, it’s just — I don’t have to think about it, it just happens.

My lunches are the same, too — you go through phases. There was the turkey rasher bagel phase, you all remember that phase, don’t you? Everywhere I went that came with me. Now it’s something different again — radishes, salad, wraps. I’ll go for a phase until I’m utterly sick of it, and then change it — because I couldn’t handle that feeling anymore of “what shall we have for dinner.” Yeah, it works for me.

I like that, I actually think that’s really good. What happens on nights where someone’s not there to eat, or you want to go out — do you pre-plan that, or do you just keep the leftovers for another day? We would never eat out during the week, that wouldn’t happen — unless it’s just one of us, and the rest of us continue with the same. At the weekend that might be a treat.

And do you all eat together, same mealtime? No — because Sienna has a cheer schedule, so that dictates whether she’s going to be there and what time everyone else eats. So poker nights I will just eat and go, and then bolognese nights we tend to eat together, but Sienna’s not there. So we have a mix all through the week, but on a Friday night we always eat together.

I think this is modern family life, isn’t it — often the children eat one meal earlier, and then mum and dad, or however that works, eat a different meal later, and you just end up cooking all the time. Yeah, and also we were eating at half nine at night, and I know we can’t be the only ones, but we would ask ourselves, “What are we doing wrong?” — because by the time we get in, do bath time, they’ve already had dinner, and then get them ready for bed, and then I for some reason need to get ready for bed too, and then we cook. It would be half nine every night, and I just think, this is not a life, I’m so hungry, I’m over it by then. So meal planning has stopped us doing that, because the meal is cooked, we just need to reheat.

That’s good, but that’s like a two-week plan — a bit of variation, just a two-week turnaround would be great. I do like — just a takeaway in there — I would love takeaway too, I’m just being more mindful at the moment.

But I think there’s a lot of parents who will be stuck in this world of doing different meals for different people in the family, or even where your kids don’t eat the same thing, and it can be quite a chore. I was brought up on that — my mum did four meals every day, different meals for all of us, everyone a different meal. I feel so bad for my mum now, because I didn’t value it as a kid. I remember once she made me shepherd’s pie — and now I’d love to be made shepherd’s pie — and dished it out in front of me, and I remember thinking, “I don’t want that shepherd’s pie,” and then she made me have ham, and I was like, “make yourself something else,” I’d like ham and toast, and I was still hungry. And now I think this is karma, because having a home-cooked meal made for me is such a treat now, as a busy mum. But my kids last night — I made them a pie, and oh, the drama. “I don’t like pie.” I’ve got to take the cap off the pie, and then it turned out it was just because they thought it was a beef pie and it was in fact a chicken pie. And then everybody liked it, and by the time they realised they liked it, I’m cross about taking the cap off. But I don’t even eat pie, you know. So, yeah, but this is dinnertime dramas, isn’t it.

We always have a thing about desserts — we don’t really have desserts in my house, might have yoghurts in the fridge or fruit available, so we’re not used to eating desserts. So whenever one of my children’s friends comes round, I have to suddenly think, “Oh god, I have to get a dessert,” so I go to the shop and try and find stuff that makes it look like I have desserts, because it’s been a complaint before by one of Amy’s friends — “You don’t have any desserts.” I’m like, what?

So true, though — other people’s kids coming round. So, Holly says: “I am sick to death of making dinners constantly and using up so much of my brain power wondering what everyone in my household is going to eat, and then doing it all over again every day, every week.” Oh, we can relate.

What’s one tip we can give Holly to help her out here? Well, I’ve enjoyed having the addition of Stocked, like I said, the frozen things on a rotation or subscription, and planning it out just means you have less waste. And also delegating — it’s not all my job, I’m not actually sick of it because I only do it sometimes and my partner does the other. So I think there’s a few things in there.

I did ask the kids to get involved as well — I was like, “Okay, what shall we put on our menu? You’re not allowed to say McDonald’s — what can we cook that you can have?” And actually Sienna, who’s 12, has been going on Pinterest, and she’s added to the menu — these beef sliders are amazing, we would never have had those, and they’re a staple now, but that’s because she brought that to the table. So you can include your kids as well.

I include them when I do that rare time I cook, and then I will include them in the cooking — even though it’s slightly stressful, it just changes it a little bit, gets them involved, and I’m not stressed with them constantly calling me because they want to play. Or we’ll do homemade pizzas — something a little bit child-based.

I do find when they’re involved they eat it — if either of my kids has got involved in stirring something, then suddenly they’re invested in that dinner. Jack — my toddler, if you’ve got toddlers — he won’t eat egg if you cook it for him and put it on the plate, but if we make “magic egg,” which is he cracks the egg and we put it in the microwave, which to me is like the worst version of scrambled egg, he’ll eat that, because there’s obviously a process and he thinks it’s magic, so he’ll eat the whole egg. So toddlers, I think you can be surprised at how interested they are in the process of creating something, and you can definitely embed some really good habits.

Jamie Oliver as well is fantastic at including his children in the cooking — our TV has defaulted to Jamie Oliver’s channel recently, he’s got a whole channel, did you know that? And Jack loves watching it. I keep watching thinking he’s so good at meal ideas including the kids in different ways. And the Body Coach is obviously very good at that as well. So I think you can get some inspiration from some celeb chefs.

Okay, so whether you are now going to make yourself a menu for the week, or whether you’re going to keep winging it but with some freezer inspiration — I’m going to take inspiration there, I’ll be asking Shel, what do you actually put in the freezer? I want to know. Everything from the shop. No, because it’s the same stuff you guys have spoken about — so it would be chicken, mince, pork, you know, the standard stuff like that. Then you’ve got all shades of beige, or 50 shades of beige as I call it, for Saturday. And I like teriyaki chicken skewers, we have frozen veg — so it’s a healthy meal when it comes out. I’ve got this nice sourdough cheesy garlic bread that keeps coming out at the moment.

Oh, it’s stacked and terribly organised, it like falls on you when you open it. But yeah, it’s all there, and the air fryer is your friend — you can knock out a dinner in 10 minutes. It’s probably not something I’m going to eat, but I don’t generally eat what they eat anyway, so I’ll just do my healthy vegetarian thing on the side, but that works for us.

So, I don’t know about anyone else, but my food shop is as tailored as the menu — there is no spare food. By Sunday, you can’t even get a snack. I can throw a party at any point in my house and provide a buffet — it’s my mum, have we all thought about that? Yeah, just open the freezer, you can make up sweetcorn with chips and curry sauce if you like, because that’s in there — but I didn’t obviously do that. I’ll generally have lots of little bits, all the little party food bits — I can literally lay out a buffet at any moment. Perfect, we’ll come to you soon then, Shel — hashtag “more Shelly,” once again, get my disco ball out.

Okay, so whether you’re going to fill your freezer now, emulate a menu like me, or ask your husband or partner to cook for you instead — and Gemma’s somewhere in between all that — or get Stocked, is that what it’s called, Stocked — we hope this episode has helped you. We know it’s a little bit different, but do give us some feedback so we know what else is going to give you value. Thanks for joining us, and we will see you next time.