I have been setting time aside this week to build my control journal the Flylady way. Hopefully, by following her steps one at a time, I will be able to do this long term!
Ever since the beginning of the year, I have come to a standstill with my weekly menu planning. I just can't seem to think of anything to cook! My pantry and freezer are well-stocked, so the problem obviously lies with me.:-) I made a master list of the foods we like in their respective categories and started doing a monthly dinner menu. Then each week, I can transfer it to a weekly menu and include side dishes and breakfast and lunch menus, which are simple to come up with in comparison! After several months, I should be able to rotate the menus, and it will help me to remember to prepare our favorites on a more consistent basis.
For the sake of simplicity, I adopted and adapted the "If it's Monday, it must be spaghetti" meal plan.(On the Flylady website.) This was helpful in preparing the monthly menu because it gave me a game plan to go by. I also left at least one day open a week for Cook's Choice, so that I can either try a new recipe or use leftovers(my friend in cooking and eating frugally.) Here is the plan I came up with, which I'm sure will be tweaked as the year moves along :-):
Monday: dinner with small group 3 weeks out of month, otherwise Cook's Choice
Tuesday: Soup and salad or sandwich
Wednesday: vegetarian night
Thursday: crockpot or something from freezer
Friday: Cook's Choice
Saturday: Breakfast foods(I like doing this in the evening when there is more time and it will be helpful when yard sale season rolls around! Heehee!!!)
Sunday: Snack-type foods
My husband's supervisor sent home some cooking magazines for me to look at yesterday. Some of them are the Kraft Food and Family magazines. I am getting lots of great ideas. A lot of these recipes call for convenience items that I don't normally keep on hand, but others use cheaper ingredients that I do have in stock. I already found a few that I want to try and some more expensive ones that would be good for a special dinner(think Valentine's Day!). If these are good recipes, I will share them with you on my cooking blog!
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2 comments:
I really like having a month's worth of dinner ideas. I've been doing it for a year now. I put them on the calendar, and usually eat whats there, but sometimes we get hungry for something else, so I'll switch things around. You have it easy since Andy will eat chicken, fish, soup, salad, etc. It sure helps with trying not to eat out so often, and planning a grocery list. But there is always the night that you will grab the mad money and go buy a couple of cheeseburgers from McDonald's--its not a crime. I added a couple of links to our cooking blog, so there might be some more ideas. Also, we might try posting our lists on our blog for reference for others. Just a thought. Happy Saturday!!
My menu plan isn't set in stone and it is always subject to change for whatever reason. We eat out probably 3 times per month and sometimes it isn't really planned- it just turns out to be a hard day or schedules change at the last minute and makes a burger run sound really good, even though we rarely do the fast food thing.
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