As a newlywed, I moved to join my husband where he had been living the previous year. It took me a few months to find a job so I decided that I would spend my unemployed months having dinner ready when he got home and cleaning the house. Daily my biggest question to answer was: What's for dinner? I would look through all my recipe's make my grocery list, head to the store and start my cooking adventure. THIS WAS EXHAUSTING. Fortunately we lived less than a mile from Safeway so I could easily shop, but it was seriously impractical.
A few wives/moms around me had mentioned that they plan their menu every week or every other week and I decided that this would probably solve my "what's for dinner" dilema.
Menu planning can be done in so many different ways that really the opportunities are endless. You pick what works best for your family and schedule. There are countless benefits to planning ahead: saving time, saving stress, and the biggest unexpected benefit was saving money.
Here is MY step-by-step menu planning tutorial:
1. Gather together all of the following at the kitchen table with peace and quiet or with fun music of choice: Recipe Binder, Computer with Internet (for pinned recipes), Grocery Store Ads from Newspaper, Menu Calendar, Paper for shopping list. I do my planning on Wednesday nights because that's when all the sale circulars come out.
2. Look through freezer, pantry, fridge to see what I have on hand and anything I should use before it goes bad.
3. Thumb through ads to see if there are any spectacular sales that I could incorporate into my menu.
4. Thumb through recipes in book and online, keeping in mind what I learned in steps 2 and 3. I always try to attempt at least one new recipe each week. I also try to incorporate one of each of the following types of meals:Pasta, sandwich/burger, salad, tortilla meal, homemade pizza) this helps me keep a variety in our menu so we are not eating, tacos, enchiladas, fajitas all in one week.
5. Once I have picked my recipes I put them in my Life Planner. You can use whatever calendar you want. I used to have magenetic whiteboard on the fridge for this, but now just use my planner so all my "stuff" is in one place.
6. Now I go through each recipe and make a grocery list of everything that I need for those recipes, then I add any items I need for lunches, baby food, breakfasts, household etc. We typically just have a normal rotation of cereal, smoothies, homemade breakfast burritos for breakfast and leftovers for lunch. If you have more than just two adults and a baby you will probably have to line up all breakfasts, lunches and dinners in a full menu plan. We are not there yet so I just keep stuff on hand for easy lunches for us.
7. I implement my strategic shopping skills and couponing skills to my list (I will post on this next week).
8. I head to the store/stores and do my shopping.
Even if you do not implement strategic shopping skills and couponing just by doing the menu planning and list making you are saving BIG! We saw a huge savings before I even got intense about sales and a (small) stockpile!
There are many variations of planning so you will have to decided what's best for your family - here are some variations:
Frequency: How often do you want to plan? Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? - I used to do monthly and just make seperate lists for each week. I now do weekly so I can take advantage of weekly sales
Intesity Level: If you don't like to cook then plan easy meals like tacos, and hamburgers. You do not need to be a chef to menu plan. The whole point is to plan to save time, energy and money not to become an extravagent cook.
Family Involvment: Can your family cook? Assign different family members a day to pick the meal and prepare it. Family dinners can and should be FUN!
There are so many ways to menu plan! Anyone want to give it a try this next week? Post a comment and let me know how it goes!
Here is a link to some menu planning calendars & lists from design finch for inspiration!
Want to read about more Money Saving Tips see the other posts in this series?
Budget for your Splurges
Earn Free Money
Find a Frugal Hobby
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