Ashley emailed the following tip:
I recently explained how I put my menu planning on auto-pilot, and some of you were interested in seeing my monthly menu plan.
This list of recipes below is one month’s worth of dinner meals for my family. On weekend evenings, we have frozen pizza or deli sandwiches. For lunches, we eat leftovers or macaroni and cheese.
1. Chili
2. Tuna helper
3. Quesadillas
4. Mushroom casserole — 9.55
5. Saucy chicken — 5.116
6. Spaghetti hotdish — 2.121
7. Chimichangas- 2.129 or Chicken enchiladas — 1
8. Tilapia — 1
9. Fried chicken w/ mashed potatoes
10. Creamy hashbrowns- 5.216
11. Pesto-mozzarella chicken breasts — 1
12. Tacos
13. Pasta with white beans — 1
14. Southwest chicken & rice — 1
15. Pizza casserole — 3.49
16. Chicken breast w/ cheese & spinach — 1
17. Tuna helper
18. Baked potatoes
19. Bacon-wrapped chicken — 1
20. Ranch potato salad — 2.106After most of the recipes you will see a number that tells me where I can find the recipe. The number in front of the decimal point stands for the cookbook the recipe comes from (I know which book is which number), and the number/s after the decimal point are the page number.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have 3 monthly menu plans and after 3 months, I start over again with the first month — which means I never need to make a weekly meal plan or stress over “what’s for dinner”.
I also have 3 monthly shopping lists made up with all the non-perishable ingredients I need for each of the month of meals. I do one large shopping trip each month and then pick up a few perishable items like milk, eggs, and fruit on the other weeks.
This meal-planning method has worked very well for our family and I hope it might help you, too!
Have you ever tried monthly menu-planning? How did it work for you?
Thank you for sharing!
I just want to THANK YOU, THANK YOU AND THANK YOU… it is a GREAT idea to do more than one or 2 week at the time for dinner planning….
I love this idea but we make probably 2 new recipes a week. Are we the only people that don’t eat the same things all the time? Even our favorites only show up 1-2 times a month.
I love meal planning, too. I feel silly doing it, since it is only for me, but it makes a huge difference in how well I eat (it’s way too easy to eat whatever is handy when nobody cares if you cook dinner). I have a list of recipes I like saved in google docs (w/links to any recipes I’ve found online), and then I use Google calendar to block out days. Since I cook meals with multiple servings, I have some days blocked as leftovers, and then just fill in the rest of the days from my list. When I make a recipe, I move it to the bottom of the list, so it won’t get added to the calendar until I’ve made other things. I generally don’t have to shop more than every other week and just make meals with more perishable ingredients sooner. The advantage to using Google docs is that if I end up working late or am just not in the mood for what is on the calendar, I can just drag and drop my meals and re-arrange the order to suit me. But having a plan and all the ingredients makes it so easy to cook.
…Right now we’ve been eating dinner salads daily, since we have so much lettuce growing, so I haven’t been planning at all. We just eat the same thing each night -love this time of year.
I have a similar idea I use at home, I just put my menus, all 12, plus two seasonal.holiday menus onto excel, and then pull and use monthly as needed; I have also cross-referenced them last year so that it changed the meals up as well! Its so much easier having a meal plan, and my husband loves to know what’s for dinner, which gives him something to look forward to at work!
Thank you for sharing! I needed some inspiration with meal planning and your trying your system is a great next step for me!
As someone who works full time outside the home and has a school-age child, I would not survive without a meal plan. It saves money, time, stress, wear and tear on the car, and we eat so much better.
I did the same thing about six months ago. I started with a list of all of the dinners we eat. Then I made three winter monthly menus and two summer monthly menus that I can rotate throughout the year. Winter menus have at least one meal per week that is soup. Summer menus have at least one grilled dinner each week. Each meal has a column for where the recipe is located (cookbook, website), what side dishes to serve with it, if it can be a meatless meal & what type of food (Breakfast, Mexican, American, Italian, etc). It took a few days over Christmas break (3 or 4 hours per day) to get it all set up with a corresponding grocery list for each month, but I LOVE it now!! It is so much faster for me to plan our meals each month! I have it saved in an excel file and pull up the menu I want to use, copy it on to a new worksheet, remove any items on the grocery list that I already have on hand, add a few items that we may want for lunches or snacks and I am ready to go. I even have the price estimate and grocery store listed on the shopping list so I can change the store if the item is on sale and then sort by the store. Its also very easy to add in a new recipe every now and then. As a full-time work at home mom of two toddlers, this has been a sanity saver!!!
I actually wanted to try monthly meal planning for a long period of time but I forget how long I was actually able to pull it off with ‘monthly’ shopping. I was able to save some money this way and I was able to try and make sure that our meals weren’t a constant repeat (though hamburger helper, spaghetti and pizza very often were featured and still are) but I found that trying to build a schedule of meals for the month put a lot of strain on me and ate up a lot of time and didn’t allow for as much family input. I’d also miss out on the really good sales having bought for the month or if I was weekly shopping then I’d be in a position to buy things that were for that week excessively expensive.
Monthly menu planning and shopping are great experiments but my suggestion is allow for wiggle room.
I’m back to weekly meal planning (and half failing at that these last few weeks) and weekly shopping. I plan my meals off of the sales ads now mostly.
Not everything works for everyone but anything is worth an experimental trial.
What works for my family is similar to this, I have a notebook with all of our favorite and economical meals written down, along with the cookbook info. Then when I need to shop, I look at the sales, and then coordinate it with the recipes. This works for us because it allows for variety and also using the sale prices. I also have “summer” lighter meals on the list and add new recipes I try to the list too. We raise chickens and get a dozen of eggs a day, so we have egg type dishes a few times a week.
I love monthly planning. It does take some time to do the planning and schedules do change – but I have enough meals that it is easy to switch if something comes up. I also don’t like grocery shopping so those off weeks are wonderful!
So with this plan do you not shop the grocery sales each week? Only asking because I noticed it said you shop for non-perishable once month. I think this idea would help take a ton of stress out of life, but curious how to work out what to make for a whole month & still shop sales.
You could have your monthly budget allotment for groceries and do the monthly menu shopping one week and then make a quick trip to the store each other week for the super good sales for as long as there is money left in the budget. That’s how I would do it anyway 🙂
That is explained in the previous post.
Oh, I love that idea! I often “forget” recipes that my family loves. I love the idea of having a bunch written down, not just one weeks worth. Thanks!
I enjoy seeing everyone’s monthly and weekly meal plans, as well as frugal meals to make…but I can’t use them because of food allergies in the family. I wish I could! Dairy, eggs and nuts pretty much cut out casseroles and easy cheap egg or cheese dishes. I’d love to know how others in similar situations handle this.
I plan weekly and have done so for years now. This is very interesting, I think I will start off with a one month planner and see how it goes. Thanks for the inspiration.
Really great idea. I think I am going to give it a try. We hunt so we always have meat in the freezer and I buy from Zaycon chicken so this would really work for me since we always have meat available. I should be able to really cut the grocery budget down this way because I will know exactly what my grocery bill will be and then can work on saving even more money by using coupons and stocking up on the food I know I will need. Since sale cycles are generally in 12 week increments, a 3 month menu would work perfect for sales and stock ups!!!
This is a good idea. I plan monthly too — it goes hand in hand with monthly freezer cooking.
I have never tried this before, but I may start. It seems like a nice way to switch things around without having the same type of things too often within a month.