Advantages of Having a Menu Plan

• Wake up each day knowing exactly what you’re having for supper; no more stressing.  YES!
• Meat can be taken out of the freezer early in the day so it can actually have a chance to defrost (If I didn’t have a pressure cooker that cooks frozen meat, I would have been in trouble many times.)
• Grocery shop with a purpose
• Spend some time now to save time later
• Healthy meals can be planned

Yes, these are all advantages and I’ve been missing out on most of them.  So this month I’m going to try something a little different.  A new way of menu planning – for me anyways.

I’m going to make out a month’s worth of meals with a theme in place for each day.

Monday – Dish using Elk Meat

Tuesday – Italian

Wednesday – Dish using Hamburger

Thursday – New Recipe

Friday – Mexican

Saturday – Left Overs

Sunday – Make Ahead or Pressure Cooker Meal

I like making new recipes so I’m hoping that having a theme in place is not going to hamper that.  Would you like to join me?  You can go Here to print off a monthly meal planner.  Also, I read about a very helpful tool called Delicious.com at Simple Mom’s blog.  It is a way for you to bookmark your favorite sites and then you can access them at any computer. You also can tag each recipe for added organization. 

For example:  if I find a recipe for Chicken Enchiladas, I would tag it with the tags “chicken” and another one with “Mexican”.  Then when I go to look for Mexican meals in my saved bookmarks, I can click on that tag and all Mexican meals are brought up.  Or vice versa, if I’m looking for chicken meals and I click the chicken tag in my saved tags all chicken recipes that I have saved will come up. 

 Tsh of Simple Mom finds most of her recipes online and bookmarks them for use later.  Maybe you would find that useful as well.  

 Next Monday I’ll post my menu plan for the month.  I’ll put up a Mr. Linky.  If you would like to join, that would be great!

If a month seems too overwhelming or just too far out there for you to plan, just write out your menu for 2 weeks and then rotate those 2 weeks for the rest of the month.

And finally, if you have any suggestions for me, just leave a comment.  I’m pretty sure I still need help in this area so all advice is welcome!