Recently I have been reading a lot of very inspiring blogs. Many of which include posts about being frugal, being crafty and being organized. You can find most of the blogs I read on a daily or weekly basis on the right hand side of my blog.
Many of the bloggers that I read are into the concept of menu planning. It not only saves you time and money but it promises to make cooking more enjoyable because you already have everything you need on hand to create your meals.
The biggest problem I am having with menu planning for our family is that I am a picky eater and we have a toddler. I am trying to overcome my picky eating habits but I am so used to eating the same couple of meals every week that I'm stuck in a rut.
I also find it difficult because I'm afraid that if I cook something new and our son won't eat it, not only will I be wasting food but I will have to cook him something else.
To be completely honest, my husband does most of the cooking because he is a stay at home dad and I work full time. So getting him to cook things that require more than 10 minutes of effort will be a challenge. Essentially, I would like to be able to prepare most of the meal or at least most of the ingredients the night before so that it makes it very easy for him to put everything together.
There are a lot of different ways to go about menu planning. Some people work at it on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis.
As we cannot really afford to buy a whole months worth of groceries at a time I have decided to do the biweekly plan with a twist.
I have four weekly plans that I think I will rotate through. The meals themselves are not set in stone because sometimes you just don't feel like having a particular meal that night but I'm hoping that by sticking to the basic plan we will be able to save money and hopefully avoid ordering as much take out as we do now.
Hubby has been pretty sceptical of my ability to stick to a schedule because I am the type of person who has a thousand ideas and usually doesn't follow through on very many of them. Not only am I determined to prove him wrong about the menu planning as well as a lot of other things.
It's not that he doesn't believe that I'm capable of doing these things, but he just knows me well enough to know that I always want to start a million different things at once and I always just end up giving up on the ideas. I think I have finally learned that I need to take baby steps and start one thing at a time.
