Meal Planning

My friends have asked about my meal planning, so here it is!

It can be labor intensive to start it out, but once it's done it is amazing!

My husband made me this awesome magnet board. I put the vinyl calendar on it.

The time consuming parts:
Type up (or hand write) ALL recipes you make/ eat! Once printed, laminate them. I laminated some blank white ones to add things I forgot or new recipes I find. I put magnets on back so they can move around the calender easily. I am constantly swapping things!

Next, come up with the categories, if you want, I'm an organize freak like that. My categories are: Other, Rhodes dough, Grill, Soups, Pasta/ Meatless, Ground Beef, Crockpot, Breakfast/ Brinner, Lunch, Snacks/ Sides, and Chicken. I got zipper pencil cases for each category. I labeled the back of the recipes with what category it goes to. I try to do 1 item from each category in a week. I have a separate board, which I never use, for breakfast, snacks and lunches for a week.

I plan out a month at a time. I HATE meal planning, but I only have to do it once a month! When meal planning, I also make my month worth of grocery list on my phone, broken down by what weeks I need what. I use a dry erase marker to write the dates of each Sunday so I can keep track of what weeks are what for my grocery shopping. My list looks something like this:

If it doesn't have a date, that means I need it the next time I shop. I love this app because I can move the order around.

Not gonna lie, we don't always stick to it, but it gives me a lot of ideas! If something is skipped I just move it up on the calendar to a week that is done, or off to the side. You can see the 3 items that have been skipped so far on my calendar.

It also helps me a lot during the day. All I have to do is look at the calender and see, oh I need to thaw some chicken today. I also get input from my husband and kids for things they want. I added a lot of misc. item labels, I thought of everything possible that could come up, dinner at the church, out of town, we do Taco Tuesday at Del Taco once or twice a month, so I made labels for that too.