Meal Planning & Cooking software…time saving, money saving, stress relieving :)

Ok…Once a year I have to write a post on this.  I can’t think of another area of my life that I have relieved as much stress as I have in the cooking department (maybe with the exception of recently cleaning/purging my house ).  It did not come easy to me.  When we were first married and became parents, I did not cook well.  I had a few recipes that people gave me with wedding gifts, but we ate a lot of boxed foods, and just JUNK now that I look back on it.

For Christmas 2005, my husband gave me a copy of some cooking software.  I looked at the box and thought he was crazy.  What in the world would I ever do with cooking software? But then I read the back of the CD case, read the reviews online, read what that software would help me do, and I was hooked!

I learned to cook by recipes and ingredients, and have rarely if ever bought another boxed food item.  This software and the beginning of meal planning was life changing for me…and I don’t say that lightly.  I mean REALLY life changing.

I entered all of my favorite recipes into my software, used some of the recipes that came with the software, and found a few more favorites online.  I began to compile menus for two weeks at a time.  I wholeheartedly recommend the two week plan.  Meal planning is not the most fun thing to do for some, so only having to do it every two weeks is great.

Here’s what I do:

I first look in my pantry/fridge to see what ingredients I have on hand.  I can enter those ingredients into my software, and it will give me meal ideas from the recipes I have there…so cool!  Next, I pick a few of our favorite recipes, and I set up a two week menu and fill it in. I try to have a couple chicken dishes and a couple beef dishes on each menu.  I like to have one pasta dish, and one international dish if possible.  I add soups to the menus during the cold months, and some during the warm months.  We have seafood dishes on occasion as well.  My crock pot is my friend in the kitchen, so I use a lot of crock pot recipes.  I will add event dishes to my menus if we are going somewhere, and I make one dessert for every 2 week menu plan.  Here is what my software looks like…

That column on the left is a list of all of my cookbooks.  I can click on the cookbook I want, and scroll through it for recipes.  I add those to my menus.  Once the menus are complete, I click on “list”, and my software will make me a grocery list based on the recipes I chose, and the ingredients needed for them.  Once I have the list in my hand, I do inventory of my fridge/pantry again to see what I have on the list and what I need to buy.  I then hand write a final list and that is what I take with me to the store.  I write it based on sections of the store, and it’s very easy to shop that way.

This is how a typical week’s menu prints out for me…

I am able to choose fun fonts for printing, and it prints out in an easy to read format.  I print out both menus for the two week plan…seven days at a time.  We eat leftovers on the weekends, so I only plan five days. This gets posted on the side of my fridge, along with a sheet protector filled with all of the recipes for that two week plan. A typical recipe looks like this…very easy to read and follow with ingredients listed at the top in columns, and directions underneath.

All I have to do when I’m ready to prepare a meal is grab that day’s recipe out of the sheet protector, and voila! I’m ready to make dinner.   The nice thing about having the menus and recipes posted on the fridge, is that no one EVER has to ask me what is for dinner.  They can just look at the menu.  Now sometimes, due to circumstances beyond our control, I have to switch days around.  That is not a problem at all.  I just do it.   I make the meal that was scheduled for that day another day.  It is just whatever works out best for us. We are able to be a bit flexible. 

Here are the menus and recipes posted on the fridge…Menus on top, recipes underneath.  The watermelon pad is where I make lists of staples we need like toilet paper, etc.  Things that would not be on a cooking list

I cannot express to you enough how much this has changed my life.  It is something I only have to think about every two weeks, and then I don’t.   I just grab a recipe and cook meals.  My husband takes most leftovers for his meals at work, and we eat some on the weekends.  Otherwise we just have soup and sandwiches or stuff like that…easy peasy. I am a person who THRIVES on routine, order, schedules and everything in its place.  Menu planning allows me to have that in a very important area of our lives.  I can still be flexible, but for the most part we follow a schedule, and it relieves a lot of stress for me.

Meal planning has saved us money.  I only buy what is on my list.  I used to shop grabbing whatever looked good to me, and would find ingredients months down the road that were never used.  I have cut our grocery bill well in half doing this, and most two week shopping trips, we come out having only spent $150 or less, both stores combined.  That’s pretty good for a family of four.

For Christmas this past year, my husband bought me the updated version of my cooking software (and I got two extra copies for a STEAL).  I will soon be able to get an iPhone app for the software that will make it even easier to shop.  I can email recipes easily with the software, and I can even type the name of a dish in the search engine, and it will find a recipe for me online.  Then I just click “capture”, and the recipe is automatically entered.  SO NICE.

I gave one of my copies of my software to my sister, but I still have one left.  It is normally around $100 to buy it (SO worth it), but if any of my local friends that read my blog think that this could be for them, I’d be happy to GIVE them the other copy. (Sorry…not into shipping and you MUST be serious about this.  I don’t want to give it to someone that doesn’t really want to give this menu planning business a shot )

The example of the recipe I posted was for Mexican Chicken Stuffed Shells.  It was a new recipe, and I was excited to try it.  It was a bit more work than most recipes I use (I go with easy prep recipes ), but it made two batches.  I cooked one tonight for dinner, and put the other one in the freezer for a future meal.  Next time will not mean as much work!   The meal was very tasty, and I’ll definitely make it again.  This is what it looked like, and this is the picture that I will enter into the recipe so that I can see what it looks like when I’m choosing recipes.  I always try to add a picture, because that helps greatly in recipe selection.

I LOVE to talk about meal planning and cooking software, because it is something that has changed my life, and has relieved a great deal of stress.  Cooking is easier now, and the whole family gets involved in the planning and preparation of meals now.  We love it!  Maybe I will start posting my menus, and some of my recipes again.  I really enjoyed doing that!

Local friends….let me know if you are interested in this software.  It has been a great help to me.

Weekly Menus…

I have talked about my cooking software on this blog before.  For Christmas this year, my husband bought me the latest update. It has made my meal/menu planning that much easier, and I absolutely love the software.  It is so easy to make up menus, generate grocery lists, and print up menus/recipes so they are on hand and ready to go each week.  I thought I would start sharing my menus on my blog again.  You’ll see that my meals are very easy, and don’t involve a lot of preparation.  I’m not a great cook, so “easy” is my theme song. :) I’ll post my menus each week, and if you see a recipe you think you’d be interested in, let me know and I’ll post that too.  I get many of my recipes from other blogs and websites, so I’ll give credit to those sites, and you can visit them…especially if I have to “tweak” the recipe at all for our tastes. 

So…here is our dinner menu for this coming week.  The picture is of our dish for Thursday night ~ Three Cheese Pasta Bake.

Sunday ~ Cheese Dreams

Monday ~ Amy’s Chicken  Casserole
               Green Beans

Tuesday ~ BLTs

Wednesday ~ Creamy Velvet Chicken Soup

Thursday ~ Three Cheese Pasta Bake
                 Green Beans

Friday ~ Tacos
              Refried Beans

Saturday ~ Pizza

Sunday evenings we get home late, so we need something quick and easy.  Cheese dreams are very easy to make, and we will either have those on Sunday evenings, or Sloppy Joes, or hot dogs.  Something quick and easy.  Saturday evenings will be pizza night at our house.  We start with simple frozen pizzas, and buy the toppings to doctor them up.  I tried making a whole pizza from scratch once, and it didn’t go well.  It’s easier to just buy a frozen cheese pizza, and add what we like.

I am also planning our breakfast/lunch menus, but those items are the same every week.  There is enough variety that we won’t get bored, and again, I needed things on the list that are easy and quick to prepare.  We home school here, so I don’t have a lot of time to prepare extravagant breakfasts and lunches.  I want something good, healthy, and filling, and I think I have come up with those things in my menus.  All that to say, since they’re the same every week, I’ll just share our dinner menus with you.

Don’t forget to comment if you would like the recipe for one of our meals!

Menu Planning…

I can’t say enough about menu planning.  It is something that has made my life as a wife/mother/homemaker so much easier.  It has taken quite a bit of stress out of my life that used to be there.  At one point I had 15 weeks of menus planned.  That’s right…15 weeks.  I didn’t repeat a meal ONCE in that whole 15 week period.  I was loving life, because I didn’t even have to THINK about what would be for dinner.  It was all there in my cooking software, ready to be printed out, shopped for, and then carried out…

Then last night….I got this hair brained idea to rework my menus, rename some cookbooks in my cooking software, and move some recipes around so it all would be easier to access.  In doing that, I wiped out those 15 weeks of menus.  I didn’t realize that if I changed the name of the cookbook the menu took a recipe from, it wouldn’t know where to find it. :(  15 weeks of menus GONE.

At first I was REALLY upset.  That was A LOT of work to put those all together.  But when I looked back over some menus that I had printed out, I realized that I had planned them ALL based on our school year schedule.  We have a very different schedule in the summer.  I really needed to rework many of my menus anyway. 

I’ve been reading a few blogs lately where my friends have talked about their own menu planning.  The underlying point in all of the blogs was that you need to plan your menus in such a way that fits your family’s schedule/routine.  I thought it would be much better if I just planned my menus 2 weeks at a time (since we shop every two weeks), and did it based on what we would be doing during those two weeks.  That way I would not purchase ingredients for a meal that we would not be home to prepare/eat.  I also decided to go back to planning my breakfast and lunch menus as well.  Having the whole day of meals planned means I don’t have to figure out anything as far as food for the day goes.  It’s all posted on my fridge, and I just have to make it happen.  All of the ingredients are in my fridge or pantry.  This GREATLY reduces the temptation to pile my littles in the car and drive somewhere for carry-out which adds up after a while.

Last night I sat down with my cooking software.  I reworked all of my cookbooks and recipes so that they are better organized, easier to access, and will make my menu planning a quick, stress-free, enjoyable task for me to do.  I will do it the night before we shop for groceries.  Menus will be posted on the fridge each week with the recipes for each meal attached, so that it is all easy for me to find when I need it.  If something is frozen and needs to be thawed for the next day’s meal, we will do that as soon as dinner dishes are washed the night before.

One thing I plan to implement is bringing our favorites around more often.  It just was not realistic to not repeat a meal for 15 weeks.  We tried a lot of new stuff, and we still will, but we’ll also bring out the things we enjoy more often. Parker and Morgan are each going to help me plan a menu from time to time. When they do, it will include all of their favorites for that week. They will also be required to help me cook one of those meals that week.  They will also get to pick a dessert to make for that week.  I think it will be fun, and will allow my kids to be in the kitchen more.  I’m looking forward to it.

My usual format is to pick one chicken dish, one beef dish, one Mexican dish, one pasta dish, and one breakfast entree dish per week.  I don’t plan meals for the weekends, because we just eat leftovers or soup/sandwiches. Sometimes I double up on the chicken dishes and exclude a breakfast entree. It depends on what is going on in our week.

So yes, I lost a LOT of work, but it helped me do some things to make our meal preparation easier, and a better fit for our family.  I can’t say enough about the cooking software I got for Christmas, or what a stress reliever meal planning has been for me.  I am happy to help anyone get started on it, or to share more of my ideas here, or even share some of my menus/recipes.  I never used to enjoy cooking, but I think it was because I didn’t have a system in place that removed the stressful part of it for me.  I have done that, and now I enjoy making good, nutritious meals for my family.

I am diabetic, so most of my recipes have to be tweaked or even some rewritten.  I will post the recipes exactly as I got them from different cookbooks, blogs, websites, etc.  You can feel free to tweak them to fit your family as I have had to do (subbing fat-free for whole fat items, sugar-free for sugar-filled, etc. :).  I hope the meal preparation part of your life as a wife/mother is as enjoyable to you as mine is to me.  :)

Mini Frittatas….Yummo!

This weekend I spent time revamping the kids’ chore list, and decided that we will get back into a bit of a routine for summer.  We just function so much better as a family when we have a routine.  I love to be flexible, spontaneous, etc., and there is room for that, but I love a routine.

In the midst of trying to work out our summer routine, I decided that in addition to planning my evening menus, I would go back to planning breakfast and lunch menus as well.  There are no surprises for meals when I do that, and it takes away the temptation to throw my littles in the van for a run to Culver’s for a quick lunch…those add up.

So….I’ve been looking at breakfast recipes.  I like the recipes that I can make up the night before and refrigerate, and then bake in the morning while I get ready for the day (which will be 6am from now on…summer or no summer.  Saturday will be our sleep in day as a family).  I like the idea of us all sitting down to breakfast together as a family and having a good, filling meal for that.  I feel like I send Andy off to work with a full stomach, and the kids and I start the day better as well.  Breakfast will consist of dry cereal, oatmeal (the creamy way!), breakfast burritos, breakfast casseroles, pancakes/french toast/waffles, mini frittatas, and just simply eggs and toast some days.  My favorite way to eat eggs is “sunny side up”, and then plop them on top of a mound of shredded hash browns and mix them all up.  My mom taught me to do that, and it is SO good.  I do that in the restaurants when we go for breakfast.  Now I can just do that at home from time to time.

In looking through recipes this week, I found one on a friend’s Facebook for mini-frittatas.  They looked really good, and looked easy to make, so I decided to try it Saturday morning.  The only thing I would be sure to do next time, is spray my muffin pan with cooking spray.  I forgot that on Saturday, and cleanup was a bit of a pain.

Here are the frittatas I made on Saturday…this is taken with my iPhone, so not the greatest picture.

I posted this picture on Facebook, and what do you think I got the compliments on? The cool striped tablecloth and blue plates! :)  I LOVE them!  The frattatas didn’t turn out like the picture on the recipe I found, but they sure tasted good (and the picture was taken after I had already eaten one.  Next time I’ll take a picture of the mound of them on the serving platter)!  Maybe this week I’ll find the recipe and post it! :) If…I get any comments telling me to! :)