It's almost the end of the month, and that means a whole month of needing a meal plan is ahead.
When I first went on maternity leave with my son, I started doing weekly meal plans. I found these useful, and I did notice it cut down on our bills, but they are nothing like having a meal plan for an entire month.
Over the next few days I am going to post up how I go about making my plans. I hope you'll play along!
Benefits of a Meal Plan
I only make my meal plans for dinner. I find our lunches to be alot of the same (sandwiches, Annie noodles, snack plates) and don't require much forethought. Dinner however, when the kids have reached "witching" hour, having a meal plan is a gift. Having a meal plan takes away the need at 3 pm to think as you stare into the fridge "What am I going to make for dinner?". It's right there, in my case, on your calendar.
Meal planning also eliminates alot of trips to the grocery store. I tend to only go once a week, where otherwise I may have gone two or three times.
My husband is anaphalactic to dairy, and as a result we don't eat out at many restaurants, but I would go so far as to say, if you meal plan, you would probably be more likely to eat out less often.
Convinced? Let's get started!
Step 1
Grab the cookbooks you find you use most frequently, a pen, and some paper. Go through those books and make a list of all the meals your family loves. Utmost importance to me were meals I knew my kids would eat without a fight.
The first list I made looked like this:
Fajitas
Burritos
Stir Fry
Cacciatore
Chicken Strips & Fries (I make my strips from scratch)
Chicken Burgers
Curry Stew
Pizza
Peanut Chicken
Spaghetti
Chicken Pot Pie
Chicken Noodle Soup (also from scratch)
Alright, I'm going to stop here and come back tomorrow with what to do next. Please share your favorite dinners in the comments. It is always nice to get fresh ideas! ( that is a hint for what's to come!).
Question from Amanda on my Sobey's post: How often does Sobey's do the BOGO deals? Can anyone help answer this? Thanks!
From Sara:
ReplyDeleteThanks Carmen! I need this tutorial.
Favorite meals here
Stirfry
Fish fillet and rice
Yam burgers (I have the coop recipe I can share)
Chili
Wraps
Goat cheese chicken and roast potatoes
Lasagna
One of your families recipe that we use alot and kids eat is Tuna Casserole so easy and good. oh and Shepherds pie.
ReplyDelete-quesadillas
-chili
-tacos
-stews
Lil
I love love love meal planning! At our house, meal planning is done on google docs, and my husband and I share access to the document. Can be accessed from anywhere via any device with net access (blackberry, iPhone, iPad!) and we pull it up when it's time to plan and when it's time to cook. Instead of writing down recipes, I do a google search for the recipe name and author and generally someone, somewhere out there has shared it on the net somewhere so I post it to our document as a link! That way the document is uncluttered but we can pull up the recipe with a click.I can't think of specific faves right now but we use a lot of the "eat shrink and be merry" series cookbooks.
ReplyDelete@dragonfly - that is crazy high tech (I love it!). Amazingly I am probably the only person without an ipone, ipad, blackberry or any device of that sort. I love how streamlined your system seems though - I keep suggesting to my hubs that an Ipad in our kitchen would make things MUCH simpler :)
ReplyDeleteI love this! You've inspired me to try it next month. I'll be very interested to see what difference it makes to our grocery bill (which is A LOT at the moment).
ReplyDelete