Posted in Homestead Kitchen
Week Two: Menu Planning
One of the most important ‘tools of the trade’ for a well run kitchen is to make sure you plan out your menus in advance. This does not have to be something fancy, even planning every few days in advance will be a big help if you are new to menu planning. Eventually you can plan a week or two or even an entire months worth of menus once you get in practice.
When you plan a menu you can rest in the fact that you wonÂ’t be stressing at 5:00 because you have not even thought about meal time yet. It will also save you money by being able to make frugal food choices instead of relying on costly prepackaged food items or take out meals.
One of the best meal planning tips I know is to serve very basic recipes to your family. Know the foods your family really enjoys and serve them often. Rotate these meals over a period of several weeks.
One of my favorite meal planning tools is what I call my 5 week rotating menu. I write 5 meals a week for a length of 5 weeks. Then I rotate this menu every 5 weeks. This leaves one day a week for eating up leftovers and one day a week for a “Cooks Night Off” or for testing out new recipes. One of the nice things about the 5 week rotating menu is that you can create grocery lists for each week and reuse those lists. You could store the menus, recipes and grocery lists in a 3-ring binder for easy access.
There are other options too. If having a lot of variety is not important to you then you can just serve the same meal each Monday night, Tuesday night and so on, perhaps leaving Friday night as cooks choice or a night to eat up the leftovers. I have done this at times in my life that were stressful. I was happy knowing that Monday was meatloaf, Tuesday was tacos, and Wednesday was chicken, and so on.
No matter what method works for you, planning is a must! When you have your meals planned out then you can make your grocery list using your recipes.
Shopping once a week or once every other week also helps the budget and you can rest assure that all that you need each night for meal preparations is in your pantry, freezer and fridge.
Next week we will discuss: Making a Master Grocery List
Posted by Anonymous
