Lists. The necessary evil of meal planning. I don’t know what it is, but I have gotten into a funk and can’t quite get myself planning my weekly meals. It has been boring and wasteful with out them. I end up eating rice pasta because I don’t have anything to cook or I make multiple trips to the little organic market down the street. So, I MUST get out of my funk to bring some helpful tips to all of you!
I went online a few months ago and found some really helpful charts for meal planning. These two are my favorites. I also included some other charts from Flickr. (If you click on those photos, there is usually a link to where to get more info.)
Do you have great meal planning organizational ideas? Take a pic and add something to our Dog Island Farm Reader Pool here on Flickr.
Tom and I sit down every Thursday night (I go grocery shopping after work on Fridays) and go through our cookbooks. We find 7 meals we want to try and make a list. We then build our grocery list off of those 7 meals. We don't specify which day a certain meal will be eaten, so it's a bit more flexible. I find that doing this along with making a list for all of our other needs (breakfast, lunch and snacks) really helps cut down on how much we spend.