In order to maintain some sort of restraint when it comes to excessive grocery shopping, I have been doing pretty good with planning out our meals. As a family, we use Google Calendar to keep track of what we have going on. This way, we can make plans without checking in with each other and make plans for each other when necessary also.
I keep other items on the calendar such as when to give the dogs their heart worm pills and most recently a weekly menu.
Prior to grocery shopping, I plan out all my recipes for the week, plug each one into a day and off we go. It has worked out pretty well so far. I either Google search for recipes that contain certain ingredients and try those or I browse Pinterest to see what inspires me. There are also some cute ideas for menu boards that you can hang in your kitchen but with limited space in this house, I’m going to keep it to the on line calendar for now.
I read an interesting post about making freezer meals which will be helpful when I’m out on leave with the baby and when I’m back to work and our schedule is more hectic. I need to get started on trying some of those.
The freezer meals will be better suited to when you go back to work as opposed to maternity leave. Trust me on that one. Our freezer is way too small, so I’m more of a crockpotter myself.
Very good point Bezzie. I had more time to cook while on maternity because my kids slept like crazy. It is when you guys are working is when you may need it more.
That aside, forget having a baby, I need to do thisnow for the whole reason that we don’t get home from work until late and planning meals during the week kills because we just don’t have time to cook something that takes an hour prep&cook. Thanks for posting that website! I’ll have to start doing this more!
The recipes we do this with now are the chili recipe we have and chicken romaine sauce.
You know I’m a huge fan of freezing.
So funny Erin, I actually just started a new blog and this is a post I’m working on. I use Google calendar as well for meal planning and I’ve been explaining it to friends, but figured I would blog about it instead of explaining it 600 times. It is the best way to meal plan!