Moving Ahead with Menu Planning

Do you get overwhelmed by the amount of cooking that has to be done in the week?

I do!

And can I tell you how many times it has been 4:00 (OK, yes, sometimes 5:00) and I'm still unsure of what we're having for dinner? Sadly this has happened as often as I've been off on maternity leave as when I'm working full time.

I really do like cooking in general. I didn't grow up cooking much but I still like it. I can't make up my own recipes most of the time so I rely on cookbooks and other people's blogs and websites to dish out the good recipes. No pun intended.

Even with all of the information out there and all of the possibilities, I still find it hard to come up with things to make. And then I tend to make the same stuff all of the time. That gets pretty boring for my husband for sure.

And then there's the times where I call my husband on his way home from work and ask him to pick up a few things on his way home and we spend 20 dollars just to make a meal because I didn't plan ahead. Or yes, order out for pizza occasionally.

There have been times where I've been OK, and I stress on the low end of OK, at planning meals. I know when I do, we spend much less money on food. It's also a challenge when I get home from work because I want to take as much time to play with the kids as I can, but then the call of dinner lingers around and I have to cook. So I am constantly searching for quick meals that are still healthy and call for few ingredients which means less time in the kitchen overall. As I find more meals like this, I'll be happy to share them with you.

There are a few reasons I wanted to do better with meal planning.

1. I'm going back to work after next week and the thought of going back to the "old way" of meal planning, which was jotting down a few ideas and then saying, "I'll figure it out later" and never did, is not going to fly anymore. I want to be more in control of knowing what we are eating to maximize my time with my family and minimize time in the kitchen. When you make a meal plan, you can also say things like...oohh, that meal takes sour cream and so let me come up with another meal to use the rest of the sour cream. Bet you never thought you'd say something like that before.

2. Taking kids grocery shopping can be a challenge as I'm sure many of you know, so having an exact list will be helpful. While I've done exact lists before, it was never exact enough. And I'd rather get as much stuff as possible in one trip and not have to make 10 trips a month to the grocery store.

3. I want to have a better idea of exactly how much we spend on food and how often we go through things. We've always had a pretty loose food budget because I think spending money on good wholesome food is important. BUT, it was getting a little out of control so we are trying to pull in the reins on how much we spend and stick to whatever amount we decide on. My plan is to record the dates of when I buy something so I know how long it takes us to go through maple syrup for instance, or how long it takes to use up a pack of toilet paper. There are people who really know these things and it helps them plan and budget better. This might not be of interest to you, but I'd like to have this information.

4. My husband will be a stay-at-home daddy for an indefinite period of time and I know it will greatly help him to know what to serve for breakfast and lunch. He's pretty handy in the kitchen but I know this will help him stay organized. I wish I had done this months ago so I was more in control while at home!

I guess those are the main reasons. I have in the past planned out dinners for a week but then I wouldn't take the time to do the following week in time and so it would sort of fall apart. The weekly thing wasn't working for me so I'm doing a monthly plan.

I tried doing a monthly dinner plan recently where I took a calendar and wrote dinners for the entire month. It sort of worked, sort of didn't because I left too many open holes for leftovers where there weren't leftovers. And I repeated too many things.

Breakfast is usually pretty easy to figure out and I don't normally plan for it but in this plan I did, just to see how it would work. Lunches are also usually flexible and I tend to buy the same things to have on hand for lunch but there are still days where I feel like lunch is boring and repetitive so I decided to plan for lunch as well.

I read a few methods from some fellow bloggers and then sort of took their ideas and my own ideas and came up with this system. I'm sure there are lots of ways of doing menu planning and this will be a work in progress but here's where I am at this point. You can use my ideas if you want or read some other menu planning blogger ideas too. It certainly feels awesome to have my first full plan finished!

The form I used I took from Stephanie at Keeper of the Home. You can find it on her website or just use a piece of notebook paper and draw a few columns like I did.

1. I started by writing down things that I know my family likes to eat for dinner(spaghetti, grilled chicken, tacos, etc...) I asked my husband how often he would want to eat these things (weekly, monthly, etc...) He doesn't like to eat the same foods as often as I do so I wanted him to have a say in what he would prefer. The kids will just eat what we make (or be hungry)!

2. I made 3 columns on a piece of paper, one each for breakfast, lunch and dinner and a place for the date on the side. The teacher in my really wanted to grab some chart table and hang it up on the walls, but I restrained myself. Plus, I don't have any chart paper at home.

3. I started by filling in the dinner column since I knew this would be the most time consuming. Using the plan that my husband gave input for, I started filling in some things to eat on each day. If it was something he only wanted once a month, I only used it once. I also had a few new recipes I wanted to try so I put those on as well. I made sure we had one fish meal a week, one soup a week, one vegetarian, and then the rest were a toss-up between chicken and beef or turkey. I made sure every line had a meal. I know we won't need every single meal because there will be leftover nights or a night we go to a friend's house or have someone over. Sometimes, we also like to make homemade pizza. The meals will be flexible from night to night in case something comes up and they have to be switched around. Also, I left some of them a little generic to fill in with a vegetable later depending on what I find on sale or what is in season. For example, if the meal is grilled chicken and veggie, I don't put a specific vegetable down because it might not be the best choice if it's not a good price when I shop for it.

4. I repeated this process for breakfast and lunch which was simpler and I could repeat things more often. For example, my kids love eggs and eat them about 3 times a week. Again, I put things like eggs and fruit. I'll let them choose what kind of eggs they want (egg surprise, scrambled, sunny up, etc...) and the fruit will be again, what's in season or what I found for the best price. This will be much easier in the summer when there is so much good stuff in season. I'm running low on the fruit I froze this summer already!

My plan is to highlight when we eat the meal so I can keep track of how accurate it was. I'll also fill in the specific fruits and vegetables we ate. If the plan changed, like we went to a friend's house, I'll record that and save that meal for another time.

5. Once my beautiful chart was complete, I made a grocery list. First, I made a list of all the staples I would need for the entire month, only writing down what I didn't have in the cupboards already. This was things like grains, pasta, rice, canned goods, dried fruit, oils, etc... These are foods I purchase at our local health food store or find in our main chain grocery store.

6. Then I made a list JUST for this week of what fresh produce I would need, plus things like butter, cheese, milk, eggs and bread that I buy weekly. These things I get from local markets. I'll make a new list every week for the fresh stuff based on what we have left and what the menu says we need. If I plan well enough, I should only have to go to the grocery store once a week to do the main shopping and then the local markets weekly.

Fortunately, I have lots of frozen meat from our beef we purchase yearly and chickens we purchase maybe twice a year so I don't have to worry about meat (unless I'm buying nitrate free bacon and hot dogs).

7. Finally, it was time to go shopping. I bought the staples for the month at our local health food store (with the exception of a few things I couldn't find). I was fortunate this month I already had a lot stocked up. Here's what my staples look like:

For future budgeting purposes, I recorded how much things cost at the health food store so I can price compare and find where the best deals are for specific foods. This will take awhile but it's part of my overall goals for meal planning and budgeting.

I bought some produce at the health food store and some from a local market. Here's our produce for this week. Hopefully it will last!

Hopefully I didn't forget too much and will only have to go to market for fresh stuff. Our local markets also have places to buy fish, nuts, dried fruits and things like that so it helps to avoid the grocery store.

This whole process of planning, not the shopping, probably took a few hours and I did it in bits and pieces when I had time. I didn't like doing it that way so from now on I'll take a chunk of time toward the end of the month and do it all at once. I think that will go more smoothly. Plus, now that I have a month done, I can repeat some of these meals, add new ones, and have a record of what we've eaten and when. Hopefully, it will just keep getting easier and faster as time goes on.

So, was that a lot to take in? It was a lot to write. I tried to be specific in case you were interested in trying it yourself. Hopefully, if you've been thinking about menu planning it will give you some ideas to get started. And if you want to start slowly, maybe just try it for one meal of the day and then move into other meals. I'd love to know what you're going to try or if you have a plan that works for you already. I'll keep you posted on how this works for us!