Meal Planning.....

So I admit I am usually a pretty organized person but since having children some things have just fallen by the wayside. A year ago when we started this journey I was shocked to see that we were spending $1,100 a month on groceries for just the 4 of us! Oh my! We have since been able to get it down to $500 and it has pretty much stuck there ever since. One of the things that has helped me a great deal with lowering our grocery budget was to meal plan for the month. Now that sounds easy enough but when you have tons of cookbooks and a recipe box FULL of recipes it is a little overwhelming...I mean where do you start? We always ended up having the same old thing week after week and let me tell you it was getting really old! I just didn't have the time to sit down and pull out all those recipes and search for something to make...who does?? So I came up with the binder idea.

I spent one whole afternoon going through every cookbook I had, all my recipe cards, and all those pages from magazines that we all tear out with the intention of cooking whatever it is but never do. Then I copied all the recipes out of the cookbooks, organized all the recipes based on type (Baking, main meal, side dish, condiments, etc.) and put them into page protectors and used dividers to separate them. Then I went through all the main meals and wrote them all out in pencil on a piece of plain paper, then slid that into the front of the binder. There you go a master list of everything your family loves all in one place and easy to find! When it is time to make up the meal plan for the week I just look at the cover of my binder and pick what I want to make and the recipes are right there at my finger tips. Plus is a meal turns out to not be as good as we thought it would (mainly magazine recipes) they are easy to remove and simply erase from the list.

By going through everything I have found recipes he loved that I haven't made since we were newlyweds! DH and I are both much happier with this arrangement! :)