Would you mind taking a quick poll for me please?
I'm trying to get an idea of how people decide what to make for dinner each night. Do you use any type of menu? Weekly? Monthly? Other? Or are you a weekend chef only?
If you just have a minute, please take the poll. If you have more time, I'd love it if you'd leave me a quick comment and tell me how - and if- you meal plan and why it works for you.
Thank You!
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9 comments:
I should clarify my vote. I like to do a weekly menu but lately I have not and it has been chaos. I need to get back in the habit because we eat better and cheaper when I plan it out ahead of time. Plus when I plan it out I don't get irritated each night when I am trying to figure out what the heck to make. :)
I now do a weekly menu plan but for a while had been doing twice a month as dh gets paid twice a month. But I find that since we use alot of fresh fruit and don't have a lot of storage space that going to the store once a week works best for us.
First of all, thanks for your wonderful site---we love your recipes!
And yes, I do a menu plan, usually for every week to week and a half. Any longer than that, and I tend to run out of fresh veggies/fruit, and it makes too big of an order to do with three little ones in the grocery cart as well :)
I like to do a month in advance but lately I just open the fridge and see what I can create. I like to vary it day to day by alternating starches, potatoes, pasta, rice etc. We also like to have a set night for various foods like pizza night, mexican night etc. This works most of the time. Some weeks we just try to use what we have and see how creative we can be using what is here and not buying anything. This is easier in the summer. Our garden is coming up very nicely:)
I don't like to have to think about what I'm making for dinner each day or even each week, so I do a menu for the whole month. I actually only plan dinners because breakfast and lunch are easy and don't require too much creativity on my part. The thing that I found that helps the most is that I use a Word calendar template. I go to the current month and just fill in what we're having for dinner on each day of the month and print off that month to hang in the kitchen. I consult my cookbooks, put in recipes I'd like to try, and old favorites. Saturdays are always Leftovers Day. I also try to incorporate food that I have in the house so that I don't have to go out and buy a lot and so that things aren't sitting around for ages (doesn't always work though!)
Oh, and I don't force myself to stick to what's listed on the calendar for a particular day. I swap days all the time like if I feel that Friday's meal sounds better than today's meal. It's really flexible!
I plan my menu's bi-monthly. I also have a recurring monthly breakfast menu. I find it helps me when my little guy asks for Waffles three days in a row! :)
http://fromthefrontlinesofmotherhood.blogspot.com/2009/04/freezer-frenzy.html
Great Blog. I'm so glad I found it!
I used to be really good at the weekly menu, which always included a new recipe to try. I think of those days as the most stress-free when it came to dinner time. The new recipe also mixed things up and took the monotony out of cooking. I keep thinking that I really need to get back to that, but never do - don't know why. We've also heard of, and tried for a while, the daily theme menu where each day of the week is a certain theme - "Mexican Monday", "Italian Tuesday", "American Wednesday", etc. That worked for about 2 or 3 weeks, then we realized that we didn't have enough a big enough repertoire and were eating the same thing each week. We still do Mexican Monday, though.
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