Menu Planning

I can barely function if I don't have a menu plan.  No menu means we end up eating peanut butter and jelly or just going out to eat.  I would guess that we easily spend 3 times our normal food budget on the weeks when I don't make a menu. 

So, how do I go about making a menu?  First I take a look at the ingredients that I have on hand already.  I try not to choose a lot of dishes for which I have to buy every single ingredient. 


Then I take a look at what's on sale.  Well, I try to do that anyway.  It doesn't always work out that way.  Sometimes I will say lets have a pot roast this week, but I get to the store and find out that roast is not a reasonable price.  In that case, we'll have roast chicken instead.  This is a comprable dish that uses many of the same ingredients.  I try to do the same with other recipes I've chosen.

My next menu planning step is to think about what we've had in the last couple of weeks (having a written menu makes this a simple step).  I don't want to have chili every Wednesday for a month.  I try to not repeat the same dishes too frequently.  If it's something that my hubby likes, he would love for me to repeat the same dishes over and over, but I would get bored.  (He's very much a creature of habit while I'm a little more adventurous.)

If I get stumped, I bring out my recipe books and just look through them.  I don't like to have the same thing over and over.  Wait, did I already say that?  Oh well... I love looking through recipes, food magazines, blogs and websites with recipes.  That's fun to me.  I know, weird, huh? 

I created a menu worksheet to help me plan all of our meals (pictured above).  When I'm done I can print  it out and hang it on the wall in the kitchen.  The kids love this because they can go to it to find out what our next meal will be (it's rather exciting for them).  I love it because they're not asking me 100 times a day what's for supper.  Jer doesn't like to look at the menu.  Just between you and me I think he's scared of what I'll be feeding them this week!  He would be totally thrilled if we had Meatloaf Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. every day of the week. 

The menu worksheet lists the meals across the top and the days of the week down the side.  Then I can just fill in the chart each week.  Harder to see is the snack selections across the bottom of the page.  I don't just let my kids graze all day.  We eat breakfast and lunch pretty close together, and then they have a snack in the afternoon.  We try to eat supper at about the same time every day.  So the kids can choose 1 snack per day from the list.  This week it happens to be all fruit.  Sometimes I'll bake some muffins and cookies and they can have some of those for a snack.  Homemade snacks are something I'm working on, but that's a different post for a different day.

So here's our menu for this week:

Monday
Grits & eggs
leftover enchilada casserole
White Bean Soup and Biscuits

Tuesday
Oatmeal & apples
Chicken burritos
Pork loin, turnip greens and corn bread

Wednesday
Muffins
leftover White Bean Soup
fried chicken, mashed potatoes, peas

Thursday
Baked Oatmeal
pb&j
spaghetti, salad

Friday
eggs & toast
salmon patties, mashed potatoes, peas
Chicken Divan

Sat. & Sun. - we're going backpacking so we'll be eating MRE's. 

What's for supper at YOUR house??

~Linda