I have been a devout weekly meal planner for years. The #1 secret to my success in this endeavor is (what else?) an app, Mealboard! The Mealboard app allows me to program in all of my recipes/ ingredient lists for different meals. Every week I select the meals I want to cook, and the app generates an aggregated grocery list for me (i.e. tells me the total number of tomatoes I need, how many ounces of olive oil, yada yada yada). Not only will it do this in order of the grocery store aisles, but I can completely customize the order of the aisles and/or add new ones so that the list goes in the exact order I travel through the store. You now how the cold case in most stores extends across five or six aisles? I have it broken down into three different sections, so I'm not hopping back and forth on the list. Sweetness! I highly, highly recommend this app, huge time saver! Added bonus: all of my recipes are in one highly transportable place.
But I digress. Even with this amazing technology at my fingertips, it's still kind of a drag to sit down every week and think about what to eat. Hence, I am giving monthly meal planning a try. I actually do this part using (gasp!) paper. First I jotted down all of our usual meals onto little post-it flags (pink for meat, blue for veg), and divided them into categories:
Then I laid them out on a month view planner, until I had what I wanted:
I removed the post-its and wrote in the meals:
Then each week before heading off to the store I just tapped in what I had scheduled. Brilliant! (If you're wondering, Thursday night is a leftover/fend for yourself night, and on Fridays we usually go out.)
There are of course things that come up and changes that need to be made. I've tracked the changes as we've gone through this month:
I have to say, sitting down and plotting planning out several weeks at a time makes the rest of the month go very smoothly! Will be preparing February's meals in the next couple of days!
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