Do you menu plan? I do. I've found that if I'm left trying to figure out what to make the night of dinner, we'll do one of the following: I'll make either spaghetti or burritos or we'll go out for dinner.
Not so great.
I love my spaghetti and my burritos (and so does my family) but it gets boring eating the same foods over and over. Now that we're a single income family, we simply can't afford to eat out more than once a week.
So, I menu plan. I started planning just for the week. Then I go ambitious and started planning for the meals in between pay day. Finally, I started planning for the month.
At the beginning of the month, I sit down with my Excel spreadsheet and I plan out my menu, one week at a time. I've been making an effort to cut down on the amount of ground beef our family consumes, so I try to split the week up into meatless, chicken, chicken/ground beef alternative and ground beef dishes. I usually plan at least one "breakfast for dinner" meal towards the weekend - these are easy to shift around if we end up getting together with family. We typically have ingredients for pancakes/waffles, eggs and hash browns on hand.
Here's an example of my menu plan worksheet:
{I highlight the meal in lavender after I've made it - to help myself keep track}
After I plan out my meals for the month, I list every single ingredient that meal requires underneath the heading of the meal. I try to shop for as much of the ingredients for the month that I'll need at once - so I'll buy all the canned goods towards the beginning of the month and anything else that won't expire before I need to use it. Then I make my list of what I can buy ahead of time and those items I need to buy for just the next week of meals (like bread, fresh produce, etc).
In any case, this was a long and drawn out post to show you what I've got planned for my family for the coming week. I'm linking this up to Org Junkie's Menu Plan Monday.
