Lunch and Dinner Dilemma.

Seems like I've finally reached my breaking point in the lunch and dinner menu department. Frequent trips to the grocery store (like 4 per week!!), too many meals at the restaurant, and scrambling to make something quick before the whole family melts down...this has been my life for the past couple of months. It's driving me to insanity!!!

So after a meal of leftovers and cheese pizza, I decided to get my life back on track in the cooking department. I've always done menus and it has been a wonderful help to me. I'm a BIG buyer and believer of organic and natural foods, so planning my shopping trip is important if I want to buy the kinds of foods we eat and save money. Believe me, buying prepared meals at Whole Foods is not cheap!

I began by taking a look at some of our favorite family meals for both lunch and dinner. I love allrecipes.com and I have most of our favorite dinner recipes stored through their Recipe Box feature. My next step was to download an empty dinner menu planner from Donna Young's website. Finally, I just filled it in for the whole month. (I did the same for a lunch menu.)

I started with our Friday meals, since we don't eat meat on those days. After that, I planned our Wednesday meals since we have faith formation on those days and having slow cooker meals is most convenient. The rest just fell into place. Leaving the weekends open for leftovers or family trips to the restaurant works well for us too.

I opted for doing a whole month of planning in advance. I think this will prevent my weekend rushing around of trying to come up with something. And once the month is over, I can just start at the beginning again...maybe switching some recipes for others. But at least I don't have to think about what's for dinner (or lunch!) for a whole month!!

My grocery shopping trips are now being planned for every two weeks, with perhaps a small trip in-between for fresh produce. This will give me so much more time for when I have our babysitter watching the kids...and I'm sure she'll appreciate knowing what to make for lunch whenever she is here!

I have included a link to both my dinner and lunch menus. All my lunch meals don't require a recipe, I just make them off the top of my head. If you want the recipes for my dinner menus, a quick search at Allrecipes.com will help you find what you need! If not, just drop me a comment and I'll send it over!!

Monthly Lunch Menu

Monthly Dinner Menu

It feels good to go back to having a plan, especially now that I have a new baby on the way in less than 2 months! Now to start organizing other parts of my life...... :)

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)

Weekly Menu.

Well, here is our menu for the week! I hope that I'm able to give someone some ideas, especially with lunch and snacks. This week I don't have to worry about the morning snack since the kids will be at VBS. Breakfast is never scheduled for me since the kids always want the same thing (cereal, pancakes/waffles, eggs) and I just rotate.

Also a note about having a 5 day menu...we usually have leftovers on the weekends and it's not unusual for us to go out to eat. Mainly, it's my time to take a break from the kitchen. I fix whatever is easiest and snacks usually are repeats from the week.

Monday
Lunch: Taquitos served with sour cream and salsa
Afternoon Snack: Mickey Mouse cheese & crackers
Dinner: Sloppy Joes, green beans, coleslaw

Tuesday
Lunch: Turkey sandwiches, fruit
Afternoon Snack: Tortilla chips & bean dip
Dinner: Chicken pepper pasta, sugar snap peas

Wednesday
Lunch: Baked potato with toppings
Afternoon Snack: Applesauce
Dinner: Savory swiss steak, collard greens, brown rice

Thursday
Lunch: Scrambled eggs & sausage
Afternoon Snack: Pretzels & marshmallows
Dinner: Baked ravioli, salad, italian bread

Friday
Lunch: Make your own mini-pizza
Afternoon Snack: Fruit smoothie, crackers
Dinner: Leftovers