Sunday, February 10, 2013

Simple Yet OCD-Satisfying Menu Planner

This is a really typical conversation in our household:

     R: What are we having for dinner tomorrow?
     K: I don't know.  What do you want?
     R: I don't know.  Whatever.
     K: Well I can defrost something.
     R: Nah...
     K: We really shouldn't go out.  How about chicken?
     R: I guess...

This particular conversation ended with the next night's dinner being chicken; but not all conversations end with staying in.  Because of our lack of planning & preparation, we end up eating out quite a bit; filling our bodies with junk & draining our wallets with unnecessary spending. As part of my new year resolution to take better care of myself, I needed to figure out something that would help me better plan my meals.

I remember seeing a few pins on Pinterest for menu planners so I thought I'd try my hand @ making one.  While these fancy shmancy menu boards featured on Pinterest are great, they are way too complicated to make & too intense for my purposes.  I really don't need handmade gemstone magnets to know what I should eat for the next 2 weeks.  I then did some Googling and saw these really cool menu planners that use a picture frame & you write on the glass with a white board marker.  That's a great & simple idea but I am picky & wanted to have something that will let me see my meals @ least 2 weeks @ a time.  Besides, a decent 10x14 frame can cost about $15.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do until I was walking around Target & saw a white board calendar on sale for $4.  This was perfect!  Nothing fussy, just a straight forward calendar that I can write on & erase as often as I pleased.  I picked up a box of tiny magnets & a pack of whiteboard markers & that was it.























The black is the meals that we're going to eat.  The blue is the starch that goes with the meal.  The green is the vegetable side dish; unfortunately we don't have one for everyday.  The red is for eating out.  The ? is for when I have run out of ideas so we are going to just wing-it the day of.  I also like to look up recipes that I want to try ahead of time, write them down, & keep them on the board with a little magnet.

This is working out really well so far.  We are not eating out as much, we only buy the stuff that we need from the produce market, & I have been trying out new recipes.  As a nice little bonus, my knife skills are getting better.  The entire menu planner "kit" - calendar, magnets, & markers - cost only about $12.  I am pretty sure it has saved me that much already & I haven't even had it for a month.

So why is this menu planner so OCD-satisfying?  Other than allowing me to excessively plan out my life?  If you know me, you know I have this thing about my handwriting having to be perfect so the white board gives me the freedom to easily erase a day's meal & write it over again if I didn't like the way it looked.  I am slightly ashamed to say this, but I have erased the whole board & re-written it before...several times.

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