Meal Planning.

You all know that I am a fan of Menus 4 Moms. It helps me keep a menu for the week when I don't have time to make my own. But now that I am getting into the swing of things, I have started moving into making my own menus using my own recipes.

I recently made a neat little menu planner using Excel. It includes a space for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. I've been using this to plan our week and I post it on our fridge. Now that we are having more outside activities (co-op, sports, faith formation, church meetings), it is a bigger help than ever!

To fill my menu with recipes, I use the following resources. The websites include rated recipes and offer comments from users. They also have the feature of being able to save it to a "recipe box" so that you can easily pull up a recipe you made two months ago, but forgot the name of.

Allrecipes.com
Epicurious (my favorite since 2001!!)
The New Best Recipe
Southern Living Cookbooks (they all have great recipes)