I love menu planning… no sarcasm there it is one of my favorite monthly activities.  I like to run my home as efficiently as I can and this is one of my secret weapons.  We need to eat,  three meals a day everyday… that’s on average about 90 meals. I face several challenges trying to accomplish this, and I’m sure many others can relate. I am busy, I have kind of picky eaters, and food is expensive.

My meal plan allows me to do several things:

• I know what I’m making every day.  Since I buy and freeze most of my meat knowing what I’m making ahead of time and seeing the menu on my refrigerator reminds me to take out the meat that I need to defrost.
• When meat is on sale in buy extra (as much as I can fit in my freezer within my budget). I can look at my menu and without much effort figure approximately how many pounds of meat I need.
• I waste much less. In August Wednesday is my leftover day.  This may change in the future to fit our schedule but this month it’s Wednesday.  On Tuesday night I can assess what we have leftover. If for some reason we done have any left overs I can take something out of the freezer, or  do sandwiches/breakfast/anything that we have in the fridge.  If we are getting towards the end of the month and we have been really good about sticking to our budget we could even do a special dinner like Pizza or Chinese food.
• I  can plan different meals with similar ingredients.  This means less costly and keeps me from having 15 different open jars in my refrigerator.

I love the fact that it allows me to streamline my shopping. I used to plan my menu without considering sales. That way I always knew the approximate cost whether things were on sale or not.  I still do this to an extent.  I plan my menu ahead for the whole month,  but now I do it in pencil instead of pen so I can modify it as needed without a scribbled mess.  This month I knew I had a stash of chicken so I planned a lot of meals based around chicken. Even tacos can be chicken if I have extra.  I also shop several stores. I use a grocery delivery for most of my meat and heavy things.  I started this late in my pregnancy when I had a hard time shopping, and now I’m still using it as a find great sales. I love my local Market Basket but it’s always so busy so I’m starting to plan a trip there once a month or so to get things they carry that I love.  And I’m currently going about once a week  (sometimes more) to Aldi’s for things like bread, produce, eggs, etc. Things that we eat a lot of and are a great value there.

I keep my old menus. I used to use a white board but I would routinely rub against it ands mess it up.  Last year when we moved I temporarily lost it, and then ended up breaking it.  I think I have every paper menu from last September.  It helps me plan ahead.  I use Pinterest for ideas and then look back at old menus to see what we liked and what we didn’t end up making again.  Now I make the same favorites so often I rarely need any references because I have them mostly memorized.

My menu allows me to put my need to plan to use.  It’s almost become a hobby. It directly ties into my love of grocery shopping.  While I’m sure my family is tired of hearing me talk about it, I’m equally sure they enjoy my love of food preparation.  It helps avoid me telling them at 6pm that I have no clue what’s for dinner 🙂