Menu Planning

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One of the important things I do to help us keep our budget under control is to plan what we will be eating for dinner each week. If you find you are having trouble thinking of new and interesting ideas, keep track of what you eat for a while to help inspire your menu planning. Don’t have a recipe? Search online.

Now you can write your menu on a chalkboard or dry erase board, back of an old envelope or whatever works for you. A few years ago, while walking through the local Staples store, I spied this lovely little tool, and decided to get it. It now has a place of prominence on the front of my refrigerator. I try to plan out the meals for the following week over the weekend.

I usually stsart my menu planning by looking at our Google calendar to see which nights we have something happening. To be honest, once I finish the menu, I usually take a photo with my phone so I have it handy for ready reference in case I can’t remember what I was planning for dinner that night while I’m at work. The meals are all up for grabs on any given night but sometimes the meals that take longer to make are scheduled on nights when we will have more time, so moving them around doesn’t always work well.

The example above was obviously a time when I was counting calories. It is probably one of the early ones, because I can tell by how neat and thin the writing is, that it was written with the marker that came with the board, and that went dry a few years ago.

This was obviously not a great photo, but works for what we need anyway. Sometimes, I get colorful like the week shown below.

The one below is for the current week. I remembered I had taken the photo and hadn’t added it yet, so consider it a bonus. If you want more specifics, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

The most important thing about planning meals in advance is it helps you to make a grocery list. We all know when you shop with a list and try to stick to it, you can save money. Not only will you be eating healthier, you won’t be eating out unless it was planned ahead of time. This can also save money. Lately I have been taking inventory of what we have on hand and challenging myself to use everything up and buy as little as we can from the grocery each week. Sometimes this can backfire because you run out of everything and then you have a huge stock up week when the budget is completely blown, but in theory you saved more than enough in the weeks leading up to then to cover the budget deficit for the week.

So, do you plan your menu each week? If not, how do you know what to get at the grocery. Do you have any tips or tricks to share with us? Please give us at least one money saving idea or menu planning tip in the comments below.

You can find more interesting ideas on saving time (and possibly money) in this post from last fall, Finding Time to Write NaNoWriMo.

 

 

 

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