If you come over to our house on any given week, you will find our weekly meal plan taped to the fridge. I use a template from the The Project Girl that I love, but she has a ton of different formats and categories from planners, budgets, calendars, meal plans if any others strike your fancy.
I love to sit down on Sunday afternoons in sweat pants, pour through cookbooks, and get my thoughts organized for the week ahead. Somehow, this orderly task is therapeutic recovery after a freelanced weekend.
Moreover, I've found that planning our meals ultimately helps me cut down on cost and time spent grocery shopping. If I go the store without a dinner plan or grocery list in mind, I feel like I spend an hour wandering around aimlessly and putting things in my cart I don't end up using. Click this link for a neat post from Iowa Girl Eats on how she meal plans and grocery shops.
Also, if I have a lot of time on Sunday afternoons, sometimes I'll get started on prep work for week night... just to make it that much easier after we get in from a long day of work, errands, and the gym. Tonight, I'm going to the gym and then have a Junior League commitment so I don't expect to get home until 7:00 or 7:30. Thankfully, yesterday, I was able to able to go ahead and make dinner for tonight, so all I have to do tonight is pop it in the oven while I'm in the shower. Easy peasy!
Do you do anything like this or have any meal planning tips you use?
Can you believe this week will be September??
I CANNOT believe August is nearly over! Love the meal planning template; for extra savings I use SouthernSavers.com to see what's on sale when I pick out our meals. Totally unrelated side note: I JUST saw your cute profile pic on FB when it recommended you as someone I "might know." Small world!
ReplyDeleteML- I am totally with you on meal planning. It's so much easier to eat a healthy meal for dinner when you know what you're cooking or what ingredients you have on hand!!
ReplyDeleteI do this too! I make out a whole month's menu and do my best to stick with it. I'm a pizza lover, so every Thursday is pizza night.
ReplyDeleteAfter dinner each night, I'm already planning out the next nights dinner! haha.
ReplyDeleteML, I TOTALLY do this!! Ben hates me for it :) But I love to be super organized and only go to the grocery shop (with my coupons) ONCE a week! SUCH a money saver. I got my planning Fridge-magnet-notebook from Anthropologie, go get one!
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