Happy New Year to you all. I can’t believe we are in a brand-new year! Which means New Beginnings, and New Blessings.
To know me is to know that I LOVE making a menu for the week. And to this day, my friends still make fun of me. I have been doing it since I had my own apartment at 18. It makes a small part of my life feel organized. With 6 people in the home, it is easy to know what we are going to have. And it also helps out with our budget and know what we need for grocery shopping. Me and hubby sit down every other Thursday evening. Y’all, it is quite romantic. We get the kids in bed, check to see what meats we have already, we take a shower, grab our collection of cookbooks, a drink, pen and 2 sheets of paper and the iPad. We climb into our bed, look through the cookbooks and Pinterest (omg the food boards I have are LIFE) to see what we want to add for the 2-week menu. Most of the time he passes out (he works long hours) and I finish on my own. Again, quite romantic.
To make it easy for us, I use 1 sheet of paper for the menu and the other sheet is for the ingredients we will need. What a lot of people don’t account for is that a lot of recipes use the same seasoning. So that helps a lot when going grocery shopping, and not having to keep buying it every time we go to the store, unless we run out. We go to a local Farmers Market store called Frazier Farms to get all of our fruits and veggies. Always on a Thursday or Friday (that is their sales date). We do our grocery shopping at Winco on Saturday morning after hubby gets home from work and that is our Date Night for the week.
Here are some helpful tips for creating a menu:
-If you have a week with some long nights, then you might want to do something that takes 30 minutes or less to cook. Or do a crockpot meal.
-When those store ads come in the mail, make sure you are looking at them to see where you can finds deals on some of the things that you will need.
-We always grab extra meat from the store when it is priced well.
-If you coupon, make sure you are using them.
-Have the menu out so when your kids and partner ask “What is for dinner?”, you can just point to it.
-If you’re planning ahead for the next two weeks, like we do, get enough meat, sauces etc. Produce doesnt last that long, so we go weekly to get what we need for the upcoming week. 
Do you do a planning menu? If so, let me know what you do.
