The Green Room

Menu planning Monday

Want to hear something crazy? I haven't gone grocery shopping in a month. It's not because I'm some amazing planner - it's because my mother or husband have done it all. But that will soon change. This week, with my mom back in town to help, I am ready to venture to the grocery store for the first time with a four week old in tow. Wish us luck.

But for once, this isn't a post all about the baby! It's about menu planning, and how I go about it. (If you find that topic incredibly boring, you might want to stop reading now. For some reason I am fascinated by it.)

I got this pad from the $1 bin of a craft store. Perfect!

I mentioned a while back that I wanted Mondays to be my menu planning and grocery shopping days. I kept with this schedule and have to say that it has been great! On Monday mornings I sit down and figure out our meals for the week. If we have something going on in the evening, I write it in on the menu so our meal is planned accordingly. (For example, if we had something at 6:30 I might make a crockpot meal so that we can eat before the event if there's time once my husband gets home from work, or after it if not.) I usually don't include the weekends, because I never know when my husband will feel like going out or something. And for a while there I was consistently going to the grocery store a second time because we had run out of milk (around Thursday or Friday), so I might pick up something for the weekend then.

I try to make sure every meal includes a meat, carb, and vegetable, although my husband doesn't mind skipping the carbs now and then. (Because he's crazy like that. I could eat nothing but carbs and be perfectly happy!) I also try to not have the same type of meat two nights in a row, just for my own personal preference. Finally, we have started trying to go meatless on Fridays, and I have found that looking for recipes for this is surprisingly difficult an exciting challenge. This does make it easier to cut back and only go grocery shopping once a week, though, as produce and canned beans can make it to the end of the week easier than meat.

With my menu already planned, grocery shopping is pretty easy. As I menu plan, I write down the ingredients that I'll need on my shopping list. Both the menu plan and shopping list are on refrigerator magnets, so I can jot down any extra things as the week goes on. (For example, I already have vanilla, flour, and freezer bags on next week's list.) It only took a few weeks to get used to writing my shopping list according to the general store layout (produce - meat - dairy - middle aisles), and that makes the shopping itself much easier - no doubling back to the produce section again.

If I see a good sale on something, I'll pick it up and toss it in the cupboard or freezer for next week. You might also notice that our list includes the type of things you usually get at Target or Wal-Mart; it's less tempting and less time-consuming for me to just buy those at the grocery store instead of making the trip to the supercenter.

And basically that's it! This post is not intended to make it sound like I'm perfect on this particular domestic front. I'm still trying to figure out how to efficiently shop at both the awesome local store (where I basically only buy produce and dairy, but at great prices) and the normal grocery store. I've also never really effectively shopped using coupons and sales. If you have any tips on those things, I'm all ears!

Do you menu plan? Do you have any advice for making grocery shopping easier? If you're as geeky organized as I am and have written an entire post on it, please include the link!