When I was growing up, each of the teens in the household had a night to cook.  That was a big part of how we learned to meal-plan and cook.  In my own household, we’ve taken this a little further, and much of the cooking has been handed off to the kids because of my health.  So altogether, we have five different people planning and preparing meals — and since they’re not all shopping separately, we need a way to keep that all coordinated.

We haven’t perfected this yet.  There are still “bugs” in our system on occasion.  (And sometimes Mama just goofs altogether — like last month when I totally missed the entire produce section of the grocery list when placing our grocery order. Oops.)  But we have a general method that works when we use it right, and I think I’m not the only one trying to hand off the reins to older kids, so in case you’re in the same boat, here’s what we’ve been doing…

Assign Nights

Everyone has their own assigned nights, so they know how many nights they’re planning for.  We only do our major meal planning once every four weeks (every other paycheck is a “grocery” paycheck here — that’s just what works for us), so everyone is reminded to come up with their meal lists when grocery day is coming up.

Centralize the Plans

The key challenge we faced was needing to centralize everyone’s plans.  At first, we had everyone bringing their lists to me separately, and I was juggling lists sent to me in Facebook Messenger, lists on tiny pocket-size notebook paper, lists on printer paper, etc.  It was kind of a headache.

So I turned to a tool that had not really been necessary back when I was doing all the cooking: Plan to Eat.  At less than $5/month, this has been so helpful for keeping everyone’s menu needs together in one place.  I like this particular tool because it doesn’t give you pre-planned menus; it lets you add your own recipes, and you can then create menus from those.  (And if you have a one-off recipe you don’t want to mess with entering, you can just pop the ingredients into the shopping list instead.)

So each cook logs in and adds his or her nights’ meals to the menu in Plan to Eat.  I just check that everyone is accounted for.

This collates all the ingredients (something else I was having to do manually when everyone was bringing me their menu plans individually).  I can just select the appropriate date range and print it out.

Check the List

Once the list is printed off, I hand it off to a child, who checks the cupboards, fridge, freezer, etc. and adjusts it for what we already have on hand.  (e.g. if we already have 12 cans of tomato sauce in the pantry and the shopping list says we need 2 for our menus, she knows we can cross that off).

We also add anything else that needs to be purchased, like breakfast and snack food, juice, toiletries, etc.

Prep & Shop

From here you have a couple of options.  I’ve been doing our shopping online lately, for delivery — also for health reasons.  So it doesn’t really matter to me whether the list is in any kind of order because I’m largely using a search feature anyway.

If you’re doing your shopping more traditionally, you might want to transfer it first to a by-aisle master list so your actual shopping trip is simpler.