Thursday, October 1, 2015

Meal Organization

   As a wife/mom, one of my obvios jobs is preparing daily meals. Along with that, one of my most dreaded tasks has always been deciding what we were going to have for supper. I will open the fridge and stare blankly, then I will wonder to the pantry and do the same, and then back and forth to see what I have the all the ingredients for etc. Then call to the family for ideas only to hear "doesn't matter", or "I don't care". Lol, only really,  no help.
    A while back I saw an idea on pinterest for a meal board.  I made one.  It was the one in the photo frame with the horizontal clothes pins,  one for each day of the week,  holding a card with a meal written thereon. Really neat.  I kept losing cards, and broke off a couple clothes pins. ..we're rough here,  so I decided to use the same concept,  inside a glass frame, using the glass as a dry erase board.  It turned out great!
 

This did help my meal Organization,  but what I came up with next, really went the extra mile.  Using the same thought,  I printed out a list (organized by meat type) of the meals I make.  When I make my list for grocery shopping, I look at this,  and decide what I want to make for the week, and make my list from there.  Then, once home from shopping,  I circle all the meals that I have everything to make,  so no more going from fridge to panty trying to figure out what I 'can' make, it's right there on the wall!  Once a particular meal has been prepared,  I erase the circle from around it. Simple! 


I printed both these out using a regular ole word processing app, nothing fancy, and printed on regular white printer paper, and trimmed the excess to fit in an 8x10 frame. Dollar store dry erase makers are only $1 abs work fine :)

Hope this helps someone out there with their meal planning.  Time is precious, save it when you can :)