One of my goals, since finishing school, has been to start making weekly menus. (School made life too unpredictable and my menus never worked. It was hard to know in advance what days I would have time to cook.) I am finding this to be much harder than it should be. Generally, I sit there, staring at my piece of paper, getting distracted by everything possible and end up writing down the same things every week.
A little while ago, I was watching Food Network and got some inspiration. (For how much I watch this channel, I should have more ideas on what to cook.)I decided I was going to make a schedule. For example:
Monday: Mexican
Tuesday: Italian
Wednesday: Oriental
Thursday: ???
Friday: Sandwiches
Or something similar.
The problem I am now running into is that I still don't have tons of good ideas. We love Mexican, but I only ever make tacos and enchiladas. Having a sandwich night every week sounded fun, in theory, but I haven't come up with very many exciting sandwiches.
So, here's the part where I would like some input from all of you. First, has anyone tried this or something similar and what was your schedule? Second, does anyone have any great recipes they would like to share?
8 comments:
Try a soup night and be sure to leave a space for leftovers. I have lots of reciepes.
Darlene
Thursday could be breakfast night! Omelets or pancakes or cereal or scones.
And Ken would like to add that Nachos would be another delicious Mexican dish.
Have you ever looked at Rachael Ray's website? She has tons of recipes for each of those categories, and her big thing is 30 minute meals, which is great for busy moms. I have only tried a couple of her recipes, but they were yummy. Good luck!! :)
Hi Clarissa! Facebook brought me here...
I love allrecipes.com for ideas (and the reviews are so valuable!) Search by cuisine, ingredient, etc. I've done a planned menu for years and I've learned that I only actually make 3 to 4 meals a week and I always keep previous weeks' menus typed in a simple document so that after 3 or 4 months I can just repeat the whole thing again!
Planning ahead makes grocery shopping so easy, you'll love it. :D Good luck!
The only thing we do that is similar is pizza and movie night, which is more or less Friday night. I have major pizza lovers in my family. I have lots of Mexican recipes that I get off allrecipes. I most recently found a Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe that is fantastic. Instead of making a menu for the week, I usually make a list of everything I have ingredients to make for the week, because I like to make whatever sounds good that day.
I did the rotation by type of meat. Monday is chicken, Tuesday is pork, weds is beef etc.
I printed 18 weeks worth of menus and rotated them. It works well when I am consistent.
To put it together, we just went through my cookbooks and lumped recipes we liked into categories.
My main motivation to start rotating menus was to help with variety. We were in a Sunday spaghetti rut. I also wanted to know how many cans of what I needed for a yr supply.
Love ya,
Ton
You should check out ourbestbites.com --it's fabulous and the two ladies who write the blog are all about making things healthier and faster. I have loved their stuff.
Try e-mealz. It is $15 for 3 months but it plans all the meals out for you and they are cheap...bonus.
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