Menu Planning

Posted on Saturday, October 7, 2006 at 08:05

Menu Planning

Any mom, whether working outside of the home or as a homemaker is a busy mom and anything that assists in cutting back on time spent with our heads stuck in a freezer or running to the grocery store at the last minute, hungry and often cranky children in tow is a good thing. When I am homeschooling my daughters, the last thing that I want to worry about doing is a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up something for lunch or to have to take 15 minutes to try and remember the contents of my freezer so that I can pull something out for supper. As often as not, when I feel this way I get frustrated and overwhelmed and end up either wanting to eat out or make something quick, and often nowhere near at nutritious as I would like. Not to mention the damage it can do to a family’s budget!

I decided to take control of our families eating habits and my first step was to devise a way to be able to quickly and easily know exactly what I have on hand to prepare for our meals. I am a technical sort of gal so my immediate thought was to create an excel database on my computer. Not only is it easy to edit, sort and if needed print out, I can upload it to my palm pilot and carry it everywhere with me, thus eliminating the need to stand in the grocery store wondering whether or not I have a certain item on hand when I have forgotten to bring my grocery list. Because you can add extra pages to the database, I can also keep my menu plan for the next two weeks, a grocery list, a list of our favorite meals and my price book all in one location.

I started by creating the following pages in excel: Freezer, Food Storage, Menu Plans, Price Book, Weeks of the Year, Favorite Meals and Grocery List. Each has a different tab colour for easy reference.

Freezer

On this page, I created the following headings…

• Category: this is the type of product it is. Baking, breads, dairy, finger foods, fruit, leftovers, pasta, seafood, soups/stews and vegetables
• Product
• Date of Purchase
• Amount: be specific. If its leftovers and there is enough for only two people make sure that you mark it that way.

Food Storage

This is a list of all food items that we have in the house outside of the freezers. The only thing that I do not add to this list are the items that we go through quickly such as milk, bread, fresh fruits or vegetables, cheese, yogurt etc.

Here, I added these headings:

• Product
• Date of Purchase
• Storage Location
• Amount

Menu Planning

This page holds two full weeks of menu’s starting with breakfast, snack #1, lunch, snack #2, supper main, supper sides and dessert. I can easily print out this page and post it on the fridge for easy reference.

Price Book

A price book is a record of store and flyer sales. Most stores rotate their in store specials and by keeping track of the special prices, and the stores that they are found in, you can soon determine which store has the best sales price and when the item generally goes on sale.

To keep track of these items, I wanted to log the following information:

• Week #: this is the number of the week during the year. As I log the prices, I will eventually be able to see a pattern of the sale weeks for certain items.
• Item
• Store
• Price
• Sale?
• Flyer?
• Price Reduction: Here I will write the difference between the normal price and the sale price or whether or not the price is one that is an “in season” price (for fruits and vegetables)

Weeks of the Year

Here I made a list of the weeks of the year from week #1 to #52 along with the applicable dates. In addition, I added a column for any specific holidays, birthdays or anniversaries during that week so that I can plan ahead for any special meals.

Favorite Meals

Whenever I try a new recipe, I will mark it down here so that I can easily refer to it when creating my menu plans

• Type of the Recipe
• Recipe Title
• Location of the Recipe: write the recipe book name and page number, or if its a recipe on the computer.
• Comments: write down anything that you may have added, taken away or would do differently with the recipe when its made again.

Planning the Menu's

When I am planning my meals, I try to keep the same basic meals every week for breakfast, lunch and snacks. For suppers, I try to balance out the types of meals and plan to use the crock pot on days that I know we will be out for part of the day and I won’t want to bother with cooking dinner when we get home.

Breakfast

Monday – Toast

Tuesday – Cold cereal

Wednesday – Fresh fruit and muffins

Thursday – Toast

Friday – Hot cereal

Snacks

Monday – Fresh fruit in season/Cheese and crackers

Tuesday – Fun snack (I have several snack recipe books)/Carrots and celery with dip

Wednesday – Chips, pretzels or popcorn/Yogurt or pudding

Thursday – Homemade baked goods/Fresh fruit in season

Friday – Cheese, crackers and meat circles/Seasonal vegetables and dip

Lunch

Monday – Soup and sandwich

Tuesday – Pizza

Wednesday – Eggs and Toast

Thursday – Hot Dogs

Friday – Sandwiches

Supper

Monday – Chicken/Fish

Tuesday – Crock pot/Soup or stew

Wednesday – Beef

Thursday – Packed supper for after Swimming

Friday – Treat Night/Dessert Night

Saturday - Pasta

If you are interested in a copy of my excel database, feel free to email me using the link on the side bar and I would be happy to send it to you!

menus

Posted by Anonymous on Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 12:21 - Link

I used to do all this too... unfortunately out here, we only have ONE groc. store... no flyers! :( I'm going to tweak my plans though using your system... you have some good ideas there!

PS

Posted by Anonymous on Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 12:39 - Link

Where's the journal prompts? :)