I plan my dinner menu and go shopping once a week. The pic above is the paper menu that I print out and stick on the side of my fridge.
Chris and I tend to eat a lot of meals with chicken as the main component. I have two boards on my Pinterest page for dinners, one called "Non Chicken Main Dishes" and "Chicken Main Dishes."
The first thing I do when I start to plan my menu is pull up my Pinterest boards and my Menu Padfolio.
Chris got this from the company that he works for and I immediately stole it. I mean, it's technically a tool that I use in the mission to feed him so he's not allowed to be too upset right?
I always check my freezer to see what kind of protein I already have on hand.
This week I had 1 package of chicken breasts, 3 packages of turkey, and 2 of ground beef. I get the majority of my meat to Costco. They have a 6 pack of chicken breasts that come with 2 breasts in a pack. That works out perfectly for Chris and I. I also love their organic ground beef. They turkey isn't anything special. I just tend to grab it while I'm there getting everything else. I also have a membership to Sam's Club and I've grabbed my ground turkey there before too.
If I'm planning my menu for the week (7 days) I plan on cooking for 6 of these nights. Chris really helps out by cooking at least one night a week. Granted, he usually picks the easiest meal to cook but I can't hold that against him. Because I am planning to cook 6 meals I choose 12 meals from my Pinterest boards. I make sure that they are a mixture of meals that are new, and meals that we haven't tried before.
Here are the 12 meals I picked out for this week.
Then I pass the list over to Chris and let him pick the 6 meals that sound the best to him. I almost always put beef stroganoff on the list. I've only made it once before and it was the first meal I ever cooked for Chris. It was about a month into our relationship and way before I got really good at cooking. To this day I still blame it on him. He was a total bachelor and the only pan he owned was a cast iron skillet. Let's just say it ended badly and I have been trying to redeem myself and my stroganoff skills since then. He never picks it though. This week was no different.
After I have the meals picked out I go through and make my shopping list. I have a really good idea of what I have in my fridge/ pantry at any given time but there are some things I have to check on and I make a special section for those items.
Then I make my shopping list based off of the recipes.
This is what everything looks like so far.
Then I add everything else I need. And look over my check for list.
The finished list looks like this.
Doing this every week really keeps food from going bad. I will admit that there are days that I just don't feel like cooking dinner. The meal that was set to be made that night will normally get cycled into next week.
I hope this post helped everyone. Comment down below and let me know how you guys plan out your meals for the week.
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