I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend! We enjoyed lots of family time and a delicious turkey dinner that my Dad made! The weather was also beautiful so we took a couple of nice walks. Although we’re finishing today, we took the opportunity to start fixing our drafty front door. I’m hoping this will help keep the heat more consistent (and give us a cheaper bill)!
Here we are, back to a normal week. No family visiting anymore, just back to normal. Not sure if I’m glad or not! Turns out I love shaking things up from our normal routine. And of course, catching up with family we don’t see very often.
I’ve been realizing that it’s important that I include leftovers as one of our dinners or else some food gets thrown out. And that is not good for the grocery budget!
As much as I sing the praises of menu planning, there are still times when I’m having a tough time putting together a good selection of meals. Either I’m tired of planning meals or inspiration just doesn’t want to strike, even though there’s an endless amount of recipes to choose from out there. Or maybe it’s the fact that I have to execute my plan by actually cooking and buying the groceries I need!
Regardless, I still have to make a menu plan to make my grocery dollars stretch. But on days when I get stuck, here are the menu planning tricks I use to complete my plan:
Copy an old menu
I have notebooks full of old menu plans and blog posts dating back to 2009 with our menus. So when I’m in a pinch, I just copy one of those. Just goes to show, it never hurts to have a notebook especially for menu plans!
I also have a recipe binder full of favorite recipes or recipes I want to try. Whenever I flip through my binder, I often find ideas that sound perfect!
Take inspiration from someone else’s menu
There are a ton of websites out there that offer free weekly menu plans. I quite often browse a few, then use a couple of recipes off of each one to create my plan for the week. Here are some sites I enjoy checking:
Pinterest makes everything seem so deliciously appealing. So when nothing is sounding good to me, I head to Pinterest to drool, I mean choose a few recipes to try.
Check out The Meal Planner! I created the printable Meal planner to help make meal planning and saving money easy! The PDF includes:
18 pages
Monthly, Weekly + Daily meal planning worksheets
Meal brainstorming worksheets
Food inventory worksheets
Grocery lists
Price matching worksheet
Party Planning worksheet
Use theme Nights
List five different themes then plug in meals to fit the themes. Here’s an example:
Mexican night
Pasta night
Sandwich night
Soup night
Chicken/beef night
Meatless Monday
Walk away
When all else fails, I walk away for a while. When I come back, the ideas usually start flowing again!
Do you ever struggle with planning? What are your menu planning tricks?
Just as I suspected, with family in town, only a couple of meals were made last week. So there are some repeats on this week’s menu!
So far we’ve had a busy and fun week visiting. It’s been fairly non-stop, but it’s been nice since I’m mostly at home! We even managed to hit up an indoor playground on a rainy day and my husband decided I had more fun than Sienna! What can I say, the slides were fun!
Anyways, here’s what’s on our menu this week:
Slow Cooker Roasted Chicken, roasted veggies, Caesar salad
This week, family from Winnipeg will be visiting, so I’ve planned some meals that should stretch. As usual, when family is visiting, I’m not expecting to follow the menu exactly, but I like to be prepared in case we’re feeding everyone all week long.
Since we’re feeding extras this week, I thought we might all enjoy the Mini Pumpkin Cheesecakes pictured above for dessert one night.
Another week, another menu! Our weather is supposed to go a bit downhill this week, so I’m starting to incorporate some comfort meals. Do you plan your meals based on the weather? Or are you more the type to plan based on your mood? I definitely plan by the weather. 🙂 And my mood.
