Over the weekend I started to get serious again with my menu planning. I am making a menu for the entire month. My goal is do get my shopping down to one main trip a month. A regional grocery store often has good sales and is more convenient. I also find the produce is fresher and a better quality. Even better I can stick to my shopping list and am not tempted so much by impulse buys.
I do not stick strictly to the menu plan. For example if I have a meal planned for June 27 and we want it, we eat it even though it is June 12. My monthly menu plan is a general list of meals so I am not peering into the freezer searching for something I can fix.
The second part of my plan is to save my menus in my household notebook. In June 2011 I can pull out this menu plan and with a few tweaks have a working menu. I have decluttered my recipes and also have a folder of ones I want to try. Perhaps I will have meals we do not love as much or new meals that I want to add in. A year is a long time to wait to see how it works. I expect it will be fine or at least give me a good start.
I do know that the monthly shopping works as I did this when I worked. The less I am Wal-Mart, the less I am tempted to pick up this or that.
1 comment:
Menu planning was a real challenge for me too, but I recently found this great software that has helped simplify my life a lot! Cook'n Recipe Organizer makes planning my meals easy. I just input my recipe, Put it on a weekly menu, and Cook'n can print out my menu, and even generate a shopping list for me. It has made planning meals extremely easy, and has already helped me save money.
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