Feeding Your Family: Week 4 - What's for Dinner

One of the trickiest parts of creating a menu plan is coming up with ideas for dinner.  When you start to meal plan you may notice that you eat the same things for dinner every single week and you don't have many recipes in your cooking arsenal.  If you and your family do not mind eating the same seven dinners over and over again, don't stress about adding variety.  If you want to try something new, read on for some pointers on how I find new recipes.

First thing I want you to do is think of all the dinners that are easy to make that don't necessarily need a recipe and write them down. Here are some examples.
Tacos
Spaghetti
Sloppy Joe's
Hamburgers
Grilled Chicken
etc.
Keep this list in your recipe book, box, or whatever you use so you have some easy go-to meals to add into your meal plans.

Along with the list you made, here are my tips for finding new recipes for your family dinners.

1. Subscribe to a Food Magazine or two.  Ever since I started meal planning I have always subscribed to a food magazine.  Browsing through them and ripping out things I want to try keeps adds variety to our menu.  I know everything is available online these days, but sometimes I would much rather flip through a magazine at my own leisure than search the web.
Some of my favorites include:
Food Network Magazine - love the variety of styles of recipes since it incorporates a bunch of the different  food network personality's recipes.  It also has awesome cooking TIPS, which is so helpful.
Taste of Home - cheaper price, lots of recipes!
Cooking Light - Focuses on "light" and healthier recipes

2. Create a Pinterest Account.  This is my most recent supplier of new recipes to try.  I use it more than anything right now because you don't even have to look for recipes, they just pop up if you are subscribed to the right people's feeds!  Here is the link to my Pinterest Recipe board if you want to follow it.

3. Follow a Food Blog.  There are lots of people who blog recipes all the time.  Find a  blog that suits your taste and make sure you get their RSS feed, or subscribe to their email updates so you get all their posts. Here is link to some top mommy food blogs.  Some that I frequent are Pioneer Woman, Chocolate Covered Katie, Skinny Taste, Iowa Girl Eats, and Bakerella.

4. Plan a recipe swap.  This can be as elaborate or a simple as you would like to make it.  You can plan a ladies night out where you all bring copies of your favorites for everyone else and hang out over coffee and cake. Or you can do as me and a friend did and bring our binders to a chaotic event and flip through them frantically, making copies of ones we want.  Either way you end up with a lot of fun new recipes to try.

5. Buy a recipe book.  This is kind of "old school" but it works. Just pick something with a lot of variety.  One book I LOVE (actually it's the only one I really use anymore) is The New Best Recipe book.  This is my go to when needing a recipe for a specific item.  The people who put together the book literally tried LOTS of recipes for each item in the book to come up with the BEST one.  So if you want a good cornbread recipe, you can get it here without taking a chance on some Internet recipe because you know they already put the effort into trying 25 different cornbread recipes for you.  Plus it's huge and has recipes for all types of foods from breakfasts-desserts.

Next week I'm going to talk about how to organize all your recipes, so you don't get overwhelmed in a paper mess from printing things off the Internet and ripping things out of magazines.  Do you guys have any other main sources for your recipe searches?