Friday, September 25, 2009

Menu Plan Monday

So....did you notice on Monday I didn't have a menu plan for the week? By Tuesday evening I noticed I didn't have one! I've been officially planning our menu for a little over a month now and this past week I just didn't get it done and I paid for it too.

The menu plan has helped me be a little more organized than usual when it comes to meal time. I know what I need to take out and I'm not searching at 4pm for something to fix for dinner. It also helps me plan around our basketball schedule because we usually have crockpot meals on those days.

If you haven't tried menu planning, why not try it. The way I started was to sit down and make a list of all the meals I make for our family. By the time I was finished I had a list of somewhere around 30 meals! Whoo Hooo! One for each day of the month! That would make planning a lot easier.

Almost all of the meals I make are made from items I normally have in the pantry and planning the menu on Sunday allows me to stop after church to pick up the items I'll need. This all makes for fewer trips to town (we live 12 miles from the nearest SMALL town) and one relaxed mom!

There are other ways to make menu planning easy and might be helpful to those with less experience. A friend of mine uses Saving Dinner but there are others out there that are similar. There are also programs that allow you to type in your recipes and then choose the ones you want to have for that week....many of those programs also have a shopping list function that after you've chose the meals you can print a "grocery" list from the ingredients. There are lots of programs to buy that do this but there are also several free programs. I recommend checking out the free ones first before buying one.

Do you have any menu planning suggestions? Share them with us!

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