The Menu Board

Spend any amount of time with me and it will eventually come out that I despise menu planning for dinners. I don't know exactly why, but it is true. For the longest time, I would just wing each night's dinner and come up with something that afternoon. Often that would result in a trip to the store. Well, then I went from one kid to two kids, and that whole "plan" went square out the window. :P I realized I had to get a heck of a lot more organized, so I got myself a magnetic whiteboard and markers, slapped it up on the fridge and started the weekly meal planning. Sometimes I'll have several weeks in a row of doing a decent job of it, and then I'll have a number of weeks where it is a real struggle. Sometimes I actually get overwhelmed by my cookbooks and become incapable of picking anything out! But I do truly love having plenty of cookbooks to eventually pick from.

Anywho, this overwhelmed feeling lead me to make a cheat sheet of our favorite recipes so that I had a quick go to when it came to picking out the meals for the week. I really like having that available to me. What I try to do now is pick out 2 or 3 new recipes to try each month and then rely on the old standards to get us thru the rest of the days. My cheatsheet wasn't very pretty tho, and it was starting to get ragged. Plus, it never contained any side dishes - another area of difficulty for me. So, imagine my delight when I stumbled across this brilliant and beautiful menu planning system on a blog I frequent - IHeart Organizing.

I was instantly captivated! It turns out it was an idea from Better Homes & Gardens. They have the templates available on their site. All you do is open the file, type in your menu items, print it on magnetic paper (yes, I was surprised to learn of the stuff too!) and voila! You have your new awesome menu system. :)

Instead of going out and buying new whiteboards and a fancy calendar, I just re-purposed my existing whiteboard and made some room on the side of the fridge for the menu labels. So my only investment was buying the magnetic paper.

Mine isn't quite complete yet. Turns out I have a lot more in the "meat" or main dish category than I realized, and I need to create a few extra labels (like "leftovers" and some duplicates of side dishes we commonly consume more than once a week). But I "launched" it last night and so far I LOVE how it looks! All of my main meat dishes, veggie sides, bread/grains/pasta and salads that we commonly eat are all listed in front of my face in a very eye pleasing manner. I hope this will make my weekly meal planning more fun and less of a chore! Here, you can have a look too. :)