Guest post by Emily from Our Frugal Happy Life
I am what you might call a hard-core menu planner. During the last week of each month, you are guaranteed to find me sitting down with my menu planning binder and a blank calendar. Yes, that’s right. I plan our dinner meals one month a time! I started doing this about 14 months ago and it has made such a difference in how our household operates.
While you may not want or need to plan your meals one month a time, I encourage you to try menu-planning in some form. For some homes, planning one week of meals at a time works better. If that’s best for you, go with it!
Six reasons menu-planning benefits our family:
1. There’s no what’s-for-dinner panic at 4:30 p.m.
This is probably the main reason why menu-planning is a must in my home. If left without a menu plan, you will find me staring at my refrigerator and pantry at 4:30, totally unable to come up with anything for dinner. With a menu plan, that doesn’t happen!
2. The entire family knows what is for dinner.
My husband knows to check the menu plan if he wants to know what’s for dinner. It hangs on the side of our fridge all month.
3. It allows for flexibility.
When I plan our month of meals, I take into account meetings, get-togethers, church functions, etc. that may affect whether or not we eat dinner at home. I can plan simple, quick meals for nights when I know we need to leave at 6:00. And if our schedule changes abruptly one night or week, I can switch a few meals around in the plan.
4. It encourage variety and trying new menu items.
I like to put a few new meals on the menu each month when I make the menu plan. By doing this, we have found a number of new favorite meals, like homemade Spanish rice, Chicken Enchilada Dip, and Cheeseburger Soup, to name a few.
5. It helps you plan ahead for shopping.
Because we live in a rural area, we don’t grocery shop on any sort of regular basis. We typically pick up groceries whenever we are in a neighboring town that has a store. With my monthly menu plan, I know in advance what items I definitely need to pick up on one of my shopping trips. This also helps because I know what to look for in the sale ads.
6. It’s fun!
Let’s face it: menu-planning is just plain fun. Or is it just me who thinks that?
I am an organized person, so menu-planning fits well with that. While I don’t enjoy dreaming up dinner on the fly, I do enjoy sitting down once a month and planning our meals. And honestly? Cooking dinner is more fun when I already have a plan in place!
Do you menu plan? Why is menu-planning helpful for your family?
Emily has celiac disease and is gluten free. She is a pastor’s wife in Wisconsin and a homemaker. She blogs about celiac disease, gluten free life, coupons and frugal living at Our Frugal Happy Life. She is here to say that it’s possible to be gluten free, frugal and happy!
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I also like to meal plan (and have actually wasted too much time doing this!). I usually do a week or two at a time since I get to the grocery store on a regular basis.
I started menu planning so I could do smarter shopping, but now I also do it based around our weekly schedule. It is so helpful to know when I have time to dive into a complex meal or if we just need something quick or in the crockpot. It allows us to eat healthier and not hit the drive-thru all the time even when we have time constraints.
I menu plan for the month too! I find it helps me stay on track with my grocery budget as well! I only put up each week’s menu plan on my blog.
I’m a big fan of Menu Planning! That’s why I designed my planner to include that great feature! I believe the key to successful menu planning is being flexible. Just because you plan it doesn’t mean you HAVE to cook it on that particular day. And planning what your family likes to eat makes it easier to get started. As you get used to the idea, you can make small additions, like trying a new recipe once every 2 weeks or so.
Menu planning certainly makes my days go smoother. That 4:30p.m. stare-into-the-fridge is just not very much fun!
My husband is working mornings and going to school at night. I’m working 10+ hour a days so we’ve managed to work our menu around crockpot meals and whatever we have in the freezer.
About once a month, we stock up on meat. It rarely goes on sale and we generally just buy at Sam’s club. We know the price and quality. I take a set amount of our food budget and it gets a separate envelope.
We can get three meals plus stock out of a whole chicken and two meals out of a roast. So, Monday night I put one or the other in the crock pot and then make the dinner for Tuesday, so it’s ready to heat when we get home. Wednesday is usually pasta for dinner and left overs for lunch, Thursday we’ll do a stir fry for lunch leftovers on Friday and then Friday is usually when we hit the bar with our friends. Saturday is generally pork chops and Sunday is soup and sandwhiches. Even if something gets moved, it at least reminds me to pull out the meat so that it is thawed by the time we get home.
Menu-planning is definitely beneficial to my sanity and budget every week! I sit down every Saturday or Sunday and plan out our meals for the upcoming week and then I hang our menu on a dry-erase board on the fridge.
Great post!
We definitely menu plan at our house! I plan for Monday through Friday dinners, plus a large crckpot meal to last us the whole weekend, like chili, soup or beans. Our weekends usually involve all kinds of craziness and activities, so I don’t plan for sit down meals. We also eat leftovers on weekends, so there is some variety. During the week I aim for one of each type of meal: beef, pasta, chicken, veggie/beans, and pork/fish, depending on what’s on sale.
I raised four kids and never would have made them go hungry. Just can’t do it. No one knows her kids likes and dislikes better than their mom, so why would I put a dish full of onions in front of a child who I know hates them, and then expect him to eat it? Sounds like a setup for that battle of wills.
I always made sure there was something the picky eater liked.
All four are grown and mostly eat everything. The youngest still hates onions. Not a big deal.
I menu planned for many years. Each child was responsible for a menu idea, with my guidance if it was a younger child. Their deadline was the day I made my grocery list. it was fun and got them involved. They clipped coupons, too.
Thank you so much for saying this, SandyH. Some of these picky eater comments are heartbreaking.
Wow! Meal-planning to the extreme! More the better, if planning for one week is helpful, why not the entire month. Kudos for setting the bar high.
Menu-planning works great for my family! I found we were eating out far too often, not because we didn’t have food in the house, but because I did not have a plan. At first I planned a week at a time and gradually increased to a month at a time, which is what I still do. We have saved a lot of money by cutting back on eating out and by planning meals around sale items and utilizing leftovers in another meal later in the week. Everyone gets input into what meals will make the schedule, which gets printed out and hung on the refrigerator.
DH was not a big fan at first (he’s more a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type) thinking a schedule of meals would be too rigid or boring (we would have the same meals over and over), but menu-planning actually allows us more freedom because of the monetary savings and we actually eat the same meals less frequently because planning ahead of time encourages me to try to add new meals to our “rotation”. Try it…you
ll love it!
We’ve discovered… it also forces you to clean out your pantry! The first day of every month, we take stock of our pantry, plan our menu for the month, and then shop for whatever’s lacking.
I’ve been planning our meals since we married 11yrs ago. I do NOT like wondering what to make.
Since our 3rd child was born last winter I put aside creativity and my 40-something different dinners that I would make. I now rotate the same 28 meals on my iCal.
I check it over at the beginning of every month and make adjustments/substitutions…..which is easy to do since all our events/activities on on that same calendar. I then print off a list of my next month’s food category.
No one cares (but me) that we eat the same thing every 4weeks. I’m sure I’ll get back to creativity, but I need streamline right now in life.
Like Emily, I plan my dinners for a month at a time, and for many of the same reasons that she does! Just recently, I started planning for TWO months, in case things get busy and I can’t carve out the time to menu plan at the end of the first month. One thing I do is if a menu item calls for a perishable ingredient (such as fresh tomatoes or mushrooms) or one that I’m likely to run out of (like sour cream), I write that on my planning calendar, so when I make out the grocery list for the week, I know at a glance that I need to buy something extra. Menu planning is important for me because my husband has cancer and we have a lot of medical appointments; this year has been horrible for him, with one additional medical problem after another. (We recently had something like 11 doctor’s appointments in 8 weeks, but to be fair, I have to say that two were for an emergency when I cut my fingers and required stitches!) If I didn’t have a plan to work from, we’d be ordering pizza or take out on a regular basis, which we can’t afford.
I plan my menus weekly because it makes grocery shopping easier, but it’s not fun for me.
Amen, amen, amen to every single point you made! As a single, working mom, menu planning is essential to the smooth running of my household.
I menu plan by the week. I start with what’s on sale and what’s in the freezer/fridge/pantry and take it from there. I work in our activity schedule (ex: soup on a stay-at-home night; pasta salad for an on-the-go night). I pack lunches for myself and daughter 3 days a week so I plan ahead to have leftovers available. We also finish up the leftovers on the weekends.
Menu planning also helps me ensure we have a varied diet. Each week we have 1) a beef or pork meal, 2) a chicken meal, 3) a soup/sandwich meal, 4) a bean-based meal, and 5) a vegetarian meal.
I couldn’t get by with my menu plan!!
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