If you follow along with my Finish It Friday posts, then you know my typical weekend routine involves planning the upcoming week’s meals. I have found that weekly meal planning absolutely simplifies getting dinner on the table, which means we eat at home more often and we eat healthier, too. So if one of your goals for the new year is to eat healthier, and you don’t currently menu plan, consider giving it a try. (I shared Ten Tips to Simplify Meal Planning this blog post, by the way, and here’s a link to my meal planner.)
Now, I’m from the school of mix-it-up meals. In other words, I’d grow really bored if Tuesday was taco night and Friday was pizza night every single week. I find cooking to be a relaxing, creative outlet, so I like to try new dishes from time to time and I like to mix it up.
Sometimes, though, I try a new dish, everyone loves it and then we forget all about it the next time we go to plan our meals. Or we sit down to plan meals, and everyone is fresh out of ideas. We flip through the recipe binder…but the same old stuff is the only thing that *sounds good* this week. What was that new thing we had a couple weeks ago? No one can recall. Not only is this frustrating, it also makes planning the weekly meals a longer process than necessary.
And so, it was time to simplify. Enter this handy-dandy form: the tried + true meals list.
This list includes the recipe name and location, as well as space for other notes. I find the recipes I’m most likely to loose track of are the ones in my regular cookbooks, so this will help me tie together the recipes in my binder with the recipes in my various cookbooks. Bingo! Meal planning just got a notch simpler. Now I can simply scan my list of tried and true recipes each time we plan our weekly meals, and never again forget any new favorites. Hooray!
Here are some other ideas for keeping track of new favorite recipes. If you’re not a list person and you prefer electronic recipes, you could create a “tried + true recipes” board on Pinterest. Or, if you prefer paper recipes (and your not a list person) you could create a “tried + true recipes” binder. If you already have a recipe binder, you could move your tried and true recipes to the front of each section of your binder.
How do you handle meal planning? Any tips or ideas to share? I’d love to hear from you!
This is great because it’s sounds just like what happens in this house! We try something new, we love, we forget about it. Thanks for this!
The first thing I do before planning meals is see what activities we have during the week. Some things need to be done ahead so it’s re-heat and eat, for the rest of the week, I plan out 5 evening meals – Friday nights are “take-out” night (home cooked take-out style meals) and the weekends are either bbq, leftovers or “high tea” meals. It’s summer here so most evening meals are salads and cold meals.
Thank you for this! I was just about to make something similar myself. I’m a new mom who never learned to cook and now I am forced to! I am trying to start on the right foot, with meal planning. I’m still in the beginning stages. I have TONS of cookbooks and just looking at them makes me feel defeated. I’m overcoming this by going through each one and trying to gather up recipes I think my husband and I will like, and have some extra toddler recipes for my 15mth old. It’s overwhelming, but having a printable like this will help! Thanks again!
Jasmine –
Start with the simple recipes with few ingredients so you wont feel defeated!
Interesting. I do tend to fall into a rut with meal planning too. I plan for the month as you know and when a “new” meal is successful, I circle it on the plan and use it again the next month.
wow ~ synchronicity! earlier this month I ordered the recipe card keeper file from Russell & Hazel (to match my recipe binder) with the idea of setting up a quick reference point for recipes I planned to make in the coming month ~ filling it with seasonal and new found favourites as well as old ones. Love the idea of this handy form to put at the front of my main binder. thank you 🙂