Menu Planning

Do you have a day that you sit down and plan out your meals for the week?  I do and Monday mornings work best for me.  I've been doing it for over 5 years now and have quite a collections of weekly menus.  At first it was hard.  I didn't even know where to start.  I took some advice from different experts like Martha Stewart and Pam Young and Peggy Jones They taught me to first assign a type of meal for each day of the week. Such as

Monday: Chicken or Pork
Tuesday:Soup
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Crock pot
Friday: Fish
Saturday: Beans
Sunday: Beef

Then start trying out recipes you think your family would like.  Over the months you will start to have a collection of favorite recipes that you can rotate throughout the year.

After I write out the week's menu I sit down with the recipes and devise a shopping list which also has the breakfast, lunch and snack favorites already listed.

There are also a lot of websites out there that already plan your meals for you with recipes and shopping lists. Just type Menu Planning in the search engine to find them.  Here is one I used to use

http://www.foodonthetable.com/

The biggest benefit to all this is saving time and money.  I'm not wasting time walking through the store every evening trying to figure out what's for dinner then giving up and going for take out.