I believe that if you spend the time to schedule everything that it will save you a ton of time later. It's just simple organization. And I dig organization. Organization rocks.
So, my latest foray into Making Life Easier ala Katehopeeden began when I received my ezine from Family Fun. I usually glance through these and then delete them, but this time the words "Monthly Meal Planner" caught my eye. My brain immediately thinks, ooooohhhhh, it's already organized... I can just copy it...
That is the first thing you should be looking out for if you are wanting to become a Super Organized Super Busy Mom. Always grab or copy or save anything that could possibly be useful and save you from having to dig random recipes out of your already super cluttered mind. Think of it like online banking: would you rather have to go through and keep track of everything individually or just copy it from the online banking page and compare it to your receipts?
So ANY time I see a menu or an easy recipe, I save it. (Another GREAT place for GREAT recipes is The Pioneer Woman Cooks. I am making that peach crisp thing this weekend because either it is as good as the pictures make it look OR I need to get that camera.)
Anyway, as it happened, Family Fun had a months worth of recipes and there is also some list function on there that I couldn't get to work which I can only hope would throw together a grocery list for you as you added recipes to your "shopping list".
I did something slightly different though.
I went through the recipes and printed up some that I thought the girls might like. I printed probably about 40 recipes and took them home and sat down with the girls and explained to them that I wanted them to go through the recipes and pick out what we would be eating next week and make me a menu. On the menu (which runs Mon-Fri), I wanted a main dish, a side and a dessert (because my kids are just ALL into desert these days). And they did. And more importantly, they are excited about this. Really excited. Because they essentially get to choose what we are eating. And because they are choosing, they can't get all pissed off when it's dinner time and it's spaghetti... again.
I then took the menu and the recipes that went with it and made a shopping list. Then I made an excel sheet with the menu on it and put notes in the box next to the food explaining any prep work that might need to be done as well as which daughter would be making which part of the dinners. Then I attached a sheet to it where the girls can say whether they liked something or not (more or less determining whether we will use that recipe again).
Now there will be a funneling down process as we try out some of these foods over the next few weeks and then get rid of the things we didn't like and keep the things that we do. Once we've done that, I can change the excel sheets to run Mon-Fri with things that all the girls like and save about ten weeks worth that we can alternate through.
The last step is I am going to get two three ring binders and in one, put all the printed copies of the recipes (with little separator tabs for like "entrees" "chicken" "desserts" "sides" etc) and then in the other binder put the weekly menus and the grocery lists needed for the whole week (encased in those little plastic slip cover things so they don't get all messed up) attached to it so that they can just pick one of the weekly menus and then I can just grab the week menu, put it on the fridge and grab the list to take to the store.
So there you go. You now have one of my World Domination via Planning & Organization secrets (otherwise known as: things people do when they don't have sex).
Labels: Being Mommy, menu planning, my crazy life, organization
