Monday, June 3, 2013

Meals, meals, meals

Does anyone else out there meal plan?  I started last year after getting tired of spending every night staring into my freezer and pantry to figure out what I wanted to cook.  And at times ending up with nothing but mac and cheese for dinner.  Living on a night to night basis was fine when it was just me and the hubby, but when we had children old enough to also join in on the meals I realized I needed to make a change.  So I finally caved last year and started meal planning.  I sit down and plan out the whole month.  I don't cook every night, and I work around our work schedules (my hubby works 3 12hr shifts that vary weekly).   I coordinate the work schedules onto the meal plan calendar and off I go planning meals.  

Let me just say this...I hate it!  I hate meal planning.  I love it in the long run.  I love not having to worry about what to make, or do I have all the ingredients.  I know what's for dinner, and that I bought the ingredients to make it.  But sitting down to make that monthly plan drives me nuts.  It's hard!  It's harder than I ever thought it would be and I dread doing it every month.  Trying to figure out what I'm in the mood to eat for the whole month just takes a long time.  Can you tell I just did this?   I do grocery shop for the whole month at one time too.  As our family grows this might change, but for now I can make one big trip.  Of course we have to make trips during the month for cereal and snack foods, but we have a great discount grocery store nearby that helps keep that cost down too.

The good things about meal planning?  It saves us MONEY.  I know exactly what I need to buy at the grocery store, and exactly how much instead of guessing at what to buy each month.  Who doesn't like saving money?  And it's stress free on a nightly basis.  I know what meat I need to thaw ahead of time for dinner and how much time it will take to make it so I know when to start.  It really has become a life saver and a sanity saver.  It's worth the one night a month when I drive myself nuts making it. 

1 comment:

  1. I meal plan! Well I did once a couple of years ago. We made a list of all the things we liked to have for dinner and then decided how many times we wanted to eat it in a four month period. Then I put it all into Google Calendar and repeated it every 17 weeks. We started the plan with just 3 months but there were too many meals to fit it in. Now with Pinterest, I have so many new meals that I want to try and so occasionally there is a meal that I do not want to have or a lot of meals that I don't want to have and that is when I go to Pinterest and replace the meals. I really just need to do the whole thing again with some new meals but it really is a lot of work but it is also really nice.

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