Picture it. My house, about 5:30 pm, every night…
My husband walks in the door after work and finds me standing glassy-eyed, staring into our pantry, trying to figure out what to cook for dinner. Finally, I decide on spaghetti. Again. But the ground beef is frozen and when I go to grab the jarred sauce while the pasta boils there is only one jar. Not enough for a family of seven for sure. Do I have a plan B? Do I run to the store really quickly to grab another jar? Do I dare ask my husband to go back into town to grab another jar? Panic. None of these are ideal solutions. I eventually sort it out, but now it’s past 7:30 and we are just sitting down to eat. The kids are tired. I’m tired. My husband is tired. And we are ALL grumpy.
Does any of this sound even a tiny bit familiar to you? If so, I may have something that can help you out a bit. It’s Menu Planning. Stay with me here. Menu planning is not a contract and it doesn’t have to be an ordeal. It’s not a miracle cure, (or even the answer for everyone), and it does require some sit-down time in advance for planning, but it can be done fairly simply and quickly with a few tips and tricks I’ve learned. Menu planning isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok! But it has made a huge difference in dinner time around our house and if you struggle with deciding what to cook at dinnertime, it might be worth giving it a try for your house as well.
Menu planing was a novel concept for me, my mom did not make a formal menu of any kind while I was growing up. But I had a friend who made had been making a menu for as long as I could remember. Just watching her make her menu is what got me started thinking it might be a good option for us.
One thing you’ll need to decide before you sit down to plan your menu is how far out you are planning. Do you like to do things weekly? Do you want to consider paydays and budgets? There were times we were paid once a month and I planned that entire month of meals all at once. Other times I planned from the 1st of the month to the 15th and then the 15th to the last day of the month. Now I tend to plan just one week to a week and a half at a time. There is no right answer and it may take some trial and error to figure out what works for you. It may also change from one month to the next. Don’t give up, keep tweaking to figure out what works for your family.
I’ve been making a menu fairly regularly for nearly 15 years now. But it wasn’t always perfect or pretty in the beginning–for a while there it was pretty hit and miss. Some weeks I would put together a menu and other weeks I would skip it and I’d be right back where we started. Other times I’d make the menu, but never make it to the store for the ingredients to make the meals.
Which leads us to tip # 1. The first thing I learned was to keep ingredients for some “Quick & Simple” meals on hand at all times. Things like chili and cornbread, spaghetti and green beans, tacos and refried beans, frozen pizza, and fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. They are simple meals and work in a pinch, and I had almost a whole week’s worth of ideas to get me by. If I was sick and my husband needed to cook he had some easy options he could throw together quickly. If my day went sideways or I simply didn’t plan well, I could always pull out a faithful standby and have something hot on the table shortly after my husband got home. And believe me, we ate some variation of those items quite often for a while.
One I started using a menu, I dreaded dinner time a little less. But it would still drive me nuts when I would get asked multiple times a day, “What’s for dinner?” I was already writing my menu out on paper so all I needed to do was post the menu somewhere everyone could see it. This actually benefited us in two ways: people could answer their own questions, and I would see the menu hanging on the fridge and that would remind me to pull whatever needed to thaw out of the freezer! I started out scratching my menu out on whatever scrap of paper was available but pretty soon I started using pretty notepads or lots of colored pens to brighten up my menu. Now, I write my menu in my day planner along with reminders for when to take things out to thaw. I’ve created two printable menus you can download and print out for FREE. One has WEEKDAY HEADINGS and starts on Monday. The other is BLANK and you can fill in whatever days work for you.
If you’re alive in this world today, (man, woman, mother, father, working, staying-home, whatever), then I know you are BUSY! Let me encourage you to make friends with your slow-cooker and/or instant pot. I intentionally plan at least one “set-it-and-forget-it” type meal each week. This has saved my sanity on several occasions. From breakfast casseroles to baked potatoes to cooking a frozen roast in your instant pot, Pinterest has a plethora of recipes to try out.
In addition to slow-cooker meals, I intentionally add no-cook nights to each menu. We almost always have some leftovers after meals and most things reheat beautifully, either on the stovetop or the microwave. But they don’t always get eaten before they go bad. By adding nights that I don’t cook to the menu I force myself and my family to “forage for food”. If the leftovers get eaten before our planned no-cook night, hallelujah! We transition to a ”whatever-you-can-find-for-dinner” night. This might be macaroni and cheese, top ramen, hot dogs, peanut butter sandwiches–anything my family can prepare on their own. (Sometimes we even just have a bowl of cereal! Breakfast for dinner anyone?!) Bonus tip–on no-cook nights, use paper plates. It’s a win-win all around.
When you are planning your menu, pull out your family calendar, and plan around your schedule. The first thing I write on my menu is anything I need to know about the upcoming week. Kids work schedules, birthdays, date nights, sports, church events, etc. Then I fill in meals based on those events. Maybe your kids are involved in an activity that takes you away from home one night so you purposely plan to have some kind of portable dinner that can be made earlier in the day, like sandwiches. Or maybe your husband will be out of town and so that’s when you plan your no-cook night and everyone indulges in cereal. Perhaps you will be the one gone for the evening so that’s when you plan a slow-cooker meal. Knowing what’s happening in your week will help you make choices about what to cook when.
Sometimes it feels like the choices for what to cook are overwhelming. If that’s where you find yourself when sitting down to make your menu, one tip that might be helpful is to stick to a pattern and use a template to help make deciding easier. Something like Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Slow-Cook Wednesday, Left-over Thursday, Pizza Friday, can help you narrow your meal choices into categories. Again, arrange your template to work with your family’s basic schedule.
The thing that made the biggest difference for me when putting together my menu, especially when I was doing two or more weeks at a time, was when I put together a Dinner Docket. A docket is a list of things to be considered. I used to pull out every cookbook I owned and also pull up Pinterest when I started planning. It was not only a mess, it slowed me way down. I would forget to add meals I knew my family enjoyed and instead ended up with a list of more complicated meals with ingredients I was usually missing. Finally, I sat down and started a list of all the meals my family likes, sorted by category: chicken dishes, ground beef dishes, meatless dishes, etc. I would add one or two new meals from Pinterest or a cookbook I wanted to try. Then as those new recipes proved to be delicious, I simply added them to the Docket. When it’s menu planning time I look on my Docket and check my “list of meals to be considered.” My Docket is written in the back of my planner, but I’ve created two printable versions that you can download for FREE. One has CATEGORIES already written in. The other is BLANK for you to write whatever category you’d like to sort your Docket by.
If you are still feeling overwhelmed with choices, you can always ask each person in your home what they would like to see on the menu. There are seven of us in my family so I would get quite the list of suggestions. I didin’t always put everyone’s suggestion into one week, somethines I would make note of them for later menus, but it was nice for each person to see their favorite meal pop up on the upcoming menu.
A menu plan won’t do you any good if you never have time to make it to the grocery store to do a full-on shopping trip. Be kind to yourself and utiize online shopping and grocery pickup whenever you can! Look through your pantry and refrigerator first to see what things you already have or what needs to be used up and then as you make your menu and find things you need, add them to your grocery cart right then and there. Schedule your pick up and you’re good to go.
Remember, a menu is not a contract. It’s a proposal. Feel free to shuffle your meals around as life happens and things come up. Some days I wake up and I just have no desire to make what I planned that night for dinner, so I don’t. Because my menu is not the boss of me. Maybe I’ll swap it with another night, maybe I’ll cook one of my pantry standard meals, maybe I won’t cook at all! I can push that meal off to another day or even next week or month. One of my friends plans a menu, but instead of puting them on specific days, she just writes them on index cards and shuffles them through the week as her life goes along. She still has a plan and all the groceries at her fingertips, but she’s tweaked menu planning to fit what works for her.
Shannon and I talk a lot about learning to live prepared rather than reactionary and a menu is a great tool that helps me do that in one area of my life. When I have a plan my afternoons and evenings go much more smoothly, I’m tempted to eat out less often–which really helps the budget, and we tend to sit down at the table together as a family more often.
I’m curious if you make a menu? If not, what holds you back? I hope you find these tips helpful and that you’ll give menu planning a try. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll share any wisdom I may have. Don’t forget to download and print out your FREE Menu Worksheet and Dinner Docket (links below). Take a picture of your upcoming menu and shar it with us in Instagram, be sure to tag TheSweet Tea Sisters so we don’t miss your post!
XOXO,
Doe