Meal Planning

I was once asked for a post on meal planning so here it is!  But you need to be warned that I didn't plan this month because I was going through a personal crisis up until about two days before I made the original post so everything you're about to see is a fake month that I just threw together for this post, lol.  {This is not what an average month looks like--we eat a lot more pizza, sandwiches and Hamburger Helper and I always have way more Crock Pot meals! I absolutely love Crock Pot meals and you can find a few posts with recipes here, here, and here.}

I go grocery shopping on the 5th of every month so, on the 4th, I sit down with my notebook, my recipe box, and my computer and I plan out dinners and weekly deserts for four weeks--I only allow myself one desert a week. If I don't set some sort of boundary, I'll bake way too much and so much will be thrown away.

After I have those four weeks planned out, I write out what will be needed for each one. Partially because it'll help me make my grocery list and partially so I'm prepared when it comes time to cook. {And another "partially" to account for my obsession with lists.}

Then, I start on the grocery lists for every week, working down the meal list, until I have everything I'll need for each meal. After that is the basic needs (breakfast stuff, milk, juice, bread, eggs, etc.), anything I'll eat while Logan is at school, and the extras. A lot of my meals and almost all of our extras depend heavily on the coupons I have at the time. {The stars next to some of the things on the list mean that those are things I have coupons for. My coupons come from the Sunday paper, coupons.com and my local grocery store has a digital coupon program where I can go on their site, select the coupons I want, and they're added to a card that I swipe at checkout.}

After that, I'm basically done. I print and/or gather my coupons and I paperclip them to the grocery list and then I put that, the meal list for each particular week, and whatever recipes I may need into each week's own folder.

And each folder gets put into my folder holder on the counter next to my microwave:

Each week, I'm ready and prepared! I just grab the week's corresponding folder and I go to the grocery store! Then that folder sits on my counter all week and goes back into its place in the folder holder at the end of the week, to be used again next month! Easy peasy!