This Grocery Shopping Trick Will Change The Way You Plan Meals

When you have to survive a super hectic week, nothing saves time and your sanity like a succinct meal plan that can get you to the weekend. While this planning technique makes dinners so much easier, we still face a ton of risks when we begin figuring out our menus. According to Taste of Home, we have to face a ton of obstacles during weekly meal prepping, like accidentally cooking the same meal too often, using too many ingredients, and even exclusively using packaged condiments. In order to help avoid some of these pitfalls, we can keep our cooking game strong by "anchor shopping."

According to Food Network, anchor shopping entails buying two or three central proteins to base meals around, "anchoring" your shopping to these specific foods. This helps prevent food waste, you don't buy anything overly frivolous, and it takes pressure off of cooking certain foods by certain days. To maximize your anchor shopping experience, you can plan to do one large trip on Sunday to prep for the week, while giving you more time to relax later in the week. With time management like this, what's not to love?

If you want to give this style of shopping a try, you can base your anchor protein around your own personal diet. You could potentially base your three anchor proteins around fish, chicken, and ground turkey, to give you a variety of directions to take your recipes for the week (via Food Network). Once you select these items, you have some options ahead of you. You can then buy the extra ingredients needed to transform these protein sources into anything you want. With a bit of imagination, you'll never have another boring meal plan for the week with this new way to approach grocery shopping.

If you love the efficiency that meal planning and prepping provides, but hate the repetition, anchor shopping can provide the refreshing answer you always needed. With this simple shopping technique, you can streamline your weekly meal prep, while guaranteeing an exciting dinner that can change based on your mood without having to make a ton of different shopping trips. Next time you need to make a grocery run, give this technique a try — you won't regret it!