Kristen McCaffrey - Stress-Free Family Meal Planning: Easy Healthy Recipes for Busy Homes

Stress-Free
Family Meal Planning

Easy, Healthy Recipes for Busy Homes

Kristen McCaffrey

Founder of Slender Kitchen

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To all the Moms, Dads, and caretakers who thanklessly get dinner on the table night after night. Thank you. You are the inspiration for this book.

To my own family, who inspires me daily to get creative in the kitchen and find joy in meal time. I love you.

If there is one thing you can do to make your kitchen life easier and less stressful, meal planning is the answer every time.

Ask me almost any question about how to eat healthier, save money on groceries, stop stressing about whats for dinner, and learning to cook, and my answer will always be meal planning. To say I am obsessed with meal planning barely scratches the surface. Meal planning truly is the thing that will make the biggest impact on your health, budget, stress level, and cooking skills.

With that said, the most important reason you should start meal planning is to enjoy mealtime again. Feeding your family should feel good. It should bring joy. But for too many of us, thats just not the case.

Mealtimes can bring feelings of stress, guilt, and frustration. With hectic schedules and busy lives, mealtime moved from a special time to connect with our families to another task on an ever growing to-do list.

I am here to tell you that meal planning will break that cycle. Meal planning makes it possible to get a healthy meal on the table night after night. Meal planning changes the daily mealtime battle. Instead of staring into the fridge every night, hoping for an answer, you will go home knowing whats for dinner, knowing you have everything you need to make it, and knowing your family will have that precious time to be together.

I come from a long line of women who love to cook and somehow do it effortlessly. While I was growing up, my mom got dinner on the table every single nightbetween a full-time job, three kids, and endless activities. To her, that time was sacred family time. Whether it was 9:00 p.m. after a soccer game or we had three extra friends squeezed around the table, we were eating a home-cooked meal every night.

Now, with two kids of my own, I have no idea how she did it. She was just one of those people who naturally made it happen. Unfortunately, thats not me. The gift of effortlessly whipping up meal after meal was not one I inherited. I have to work at it.

However, this story and my love of meal planning actually started with my struggle to lose weight, eat well, and find a healthy and happy balance in my own life.

If I look back 10 years, I was 30 pounds (14 kg) overweight and I knew how to cook exactly one dish that didnt come directly from my freezer. I was tired. I was uncomfortable in my body. Quite honestly, I was exhausted after years of trying diet after diet without any long-term success and felt far from my best.

Deep down, I knew something needed to change. I was done with not feeling like myself. I was done with always being tired and having no energy. I was done with throwing myself into another quick-fix solution that ultimately didnt work. I was done with constantly trying to camouflage myself. It was time to make a real change.

Thats when I found meal planning. After talking to countless friends and family who had either successfully lost weight or simply lived a balanced, healthy lifestyle, I learned two things that would change my approach to food and eating forever: It was time to learn to cook, and it was time to start planning my meals.

Following the advice of my auntIf you can read, you can cookI devoured blogs, cookbooks, magazines, and videos. With each healthy recipe I followed, I grew more confident in the kitchen. I also started meal planning. Each week I sat down on Sunday and planned my meals for the week. I built shopping lists, adjusted serving sizes, and got organized for the week.

It worked. Over the course of the next year, I lost a total of 35 pounds (16 kg). More importantly, I started to feel good again. I gained energy, confidence, and freedomfreedom from the negative thoughts, constant stress about what to eat, and battle to simply feel good.

And thats what brings us to this book. These days I have two little girls and life is busier than ever. It would have been easy to throw everything I learned to the side, but instead I find myself relying on meal planning more than ever. It saves my sanity.

I hope this book can do the same for you. This book takes the hard work out of meal planning and getting a healthy dinner on the table. Instead of spending every Sunday looking for recipes and building shopping lists, you can turn to this book and follow a weekly menu full of healthy meals that taste good, are easy to prepare, and can make mealtime enjoyable again.

I couldnt be more excited to start this meal planning journey with you! So grab your calendarlets make dinnertime stress-free, delicious, and joyful.

Feeding a family is hard work, especially when you are trying to eat healthfully. While I realize that looks different in every family, after some time, I have landed on my personal healthy-eating philosophy. Lets call it healthyish.

I could write an encyclopedia about what this concept means, but at its core, its simple. Its also something that resonates with most parents I know: If I can get my kids to happily eat a recipe packed with fruits, veggies, whole grains, and lean proteins, I will happily add some melted cheese, chocolate chips, or ketchup.

Thats really it. All the recipes in this book strive to use lots of fresh produce, lean proteins, healthy fats, as well as whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. (Just look at the shopping lists.) But you will also find pasta and cheese and chocolate chips. Its all about balance and moderation.

To break it down further, heres what healthyish looks like for my family: