Our Menu Plan

I just finished putting together a "recipe book" for my family with all our favorite meals that we eat throughout the month and then a couple more than we eat occasionally. You can Find it here! I hope that this is helpful for those who are looking for recipes. Many of them can easily be converted to food storage quality recipes. Eventually, I plan to go through and do the converting and figuring. For now, the first step was to put this together.

When first glancing through the pages you will notice that they are only half the size of a regular sheet of paper. I have a small binder that holds this size (see above photo) and it saves paper. In order to print I choose four pages at a time and then choose 2 pages per sheet.

I have the recipes within the document placed for printing in alphabetical order. In order to do this I had to toggle the recipes around so that they could print on a regular sheet of paper, two per sheet, and then turn the paper over for the next two to be printed on the back and have each recipe end up where it belonged. I'm sure there is an easier way to do this. It would've been easier had I just had one recipe on each regular sized sheet of paper... but, that would've been a lot of wasted paper. For now, that's how I made it happen.

NOTE: I will be updating this document as time goes on, so if you would like to keep track of it I will always leave the updated version to the right in Helpful PDF's Under "Our Menu Plan"

If you have any suggestions, comments, or recommendations... feel free to leave a comment.

Menu Planning

In my last post I had mentioned my painstaking efforts to create a 6 week non-repeat menu. I'd like to take a moment to share more about that and the transition into my more current menu. I've never been the cook in the family. My husband was blessed with terrific cooking skills and has served us masterpieces that I believe belong in a 5-star restaurant. He is, what I consider, an actual cook. I'm a recipe follower. He can go into the fridge, freezer and cabinet and put something terrific and tasty together in no time. Somehow, rules of the trade don't apply to him, either. He can take a steak straight from the freezer to the grill and it will taste great and be plenty juicy. I, on the other hand, have to follow a recipe in exactness. Only after I've tried it once will I begin making adjustments. No recipe - then, I can't cook.

I still remember the day the daunting realization came that for the rest of my life I would need to figure out what to eat for at least one to three meals a day. It was such a heavy load to see before me the need for education, preparation, creativity, and the implementation of all those meals. That's an average of sixty-five thousand seven hundred meals (60 years x 365 days x 3 meals a day) that I would be responsible for providing for my family and me. I had no idea where to start. I didn't know how to cook anything but macaroni and cheese from a box and a grilled cheese sandwich. Circumstances in my life forced me to learn a tiny bit of food preparation, but certainly not enough. My daughter thought all meat was called chicken. Which I don't understand since most of the time we had Hamburger Helper. Once married life allowed for me to stay home with my daughter, I began my quest to learn how to cook. It was a slow, painful, burnt and oftentimes an unpleasant adventure.

For many years I was be a wanna-be cook in the family and would plan out a few meals and make them. Then, I would run out of ideas and lose interest. It was back to my husband at that point. Poor guy! Then, last summer I was on one of those fad low-carb diets and was so hungry it finally motivated me to focus on menu planning a month's worth of meals that I've always dreamed of creating. So, instead of eating, I made a list of all our favorite foods and dishes. Even if it was something we only ever ate when we went out to eat or visited someone who made it for us... it was added to the list. I then tried to combine sides properly with main dishes. I messed that up a lot and appropriately adjusted throughout the year. I advise against having rice AND potatoes in the same meal, or beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes are some examples for my need to adjustments.

Next, I created a blank calendar to begin placing my foods into the appropriate days. I labeled the top of each day with a certain group. For instance, all Mondays were chicken, Tuesdays were Mexican, Wednesdays were oriental, Thursdays were Italian and so on. I did this because one of the complaints I would get when I did cook was "can we have something other than chicken tomorrow?" This way I was sure to spread these types of foods throughout the month evenly.

I spent the winter using this menu, improvising, modifying, and changing it all together. Then, my daughter started showing signs of being lactose intolerant and by June she had her gallbladder removed. Between the two she has to stay away from cheese, milk and excess fat. I really had to change the menu plan. Remember, it was full of favorites that we would find outside of the house at our favorite restaurants. Those didn't happen to always be healthy. They all either had cheese or some sort of initial frying of some sort. I was also hit with raising food prices. I had to change the plan.

As I explained in a previous post, I was shopping and realized I needed to know more fully what an entire month consisted of. I had been shopping weekly up to that point. So, I sat back down and revised my menu with the following considerations. I needed to reduce the frying, take advantage of our new chicken farm with chicken meals throughout the week made from one whole chicken cooked at the beginning of the week (I wish I had thought of that before - I've been spending lots of money on boneless, skinless chicken breasts), cheese can either be omitted or reduced for my daughter's sake (I don't generally use milk 'cause we don't drink it and I don't like it), food storage alternatives could be arranged, I could store many of the items on my shelf, grow it indoors, or preserve it from my garden's harvest are to name a few ideas I was keeping in mind this time.

I plan to post this menu soon. I think I'm close to finishing it. Wish me luck.

Once a Month Shopping

The rising food prices have forced my hand to be more frugal. For the past many years I have been very careless, unconcerned, and wasteful with both my food choices, food preparation, and food use. I would go shopping every week and make it a goal to stay within $100. Each week it would be challenge to meet that minimum. I would mostly fill my cart from the produce section and that was an expensive route, especially considering how much would go bad from being forgotten about, and what was the most damaging were the impulse purchases. Many times I would forget about them and find them in a cabinet somewhere and wonder how to incorporate them into our meals.

A few months ago during my weekly grocery trip a thought came to my mind of how helpful it would be to know exactly what it is that I need every month and to purchase it all at once. That way I would know how much should be allotted for my food budget, I wouldn't waste food, waste fuel, and I would be more organized. Then, a few weeks later at church, we were counseled the same thing. I immediately got started.

Since during the year previous I had painstakingly created a 6 week menu for my family it was easy to make adjustments for our new eating plans and current habits. Now that we raise chickens for meat and eggs, I wanted to include a lot of chicken meals. I arranged my menu to allow me to cook a chicken at the beginning of the week and create 3-4 meals from that chicken and a soup using the broth I would make from the carcass. I was also considering food storage alternatives and ways to preserve as much of the ingredients from my garden's harvest as possible. When I was finished with this new plan on paper, I took my list to the store. I was nervous when I was checking out because this cart was heaping full of food. As I anxiously awaited the final cost for a month of food for my family, expecting to hear $350 or more, I was extremely relieved when I heard $178.00! What!!!!! Only $178.00. I used to struggle to maintain $100 per WEEK! That's how wasteful I had been. I know this amount will go up a bit this next month because I had not included breakfasts and I had a few lunches not yet figured out. I don't anticipate that costing much more. So, I'll be happy to maintain our food budget between $225 to $250.00 for a month.

I'll update my progress when my menu is more complete, which hopefully will be soon!