How to Save Time and Money: Menu Planning

In this day and age it seems like everyone is always busy. Sometimes it seems easier to just stop for fast food after a long day, instead of figuring out what to cook, and going ahead and cooking it. Especially on days that you aren't feeling particularly creative. To keep myself from falling into this trap, I plan my menus out two weeks at a time.

I plan my menu two weeks at a time because my husband gets paid twice a month. I find it easier to buy all of my groceries right after payday, except for things like milk and bread that have to be bought more often. If you get paid once a week, or just like to go grocery shopping once a week, you can plan your menu for only one week at a time.

When I sit down to plan my menus, I always ask for my husbands' input. When my son gets older I will ask for his, too. I don't want to serve the same few meals every week, so I ask if there is something special that my husband wants to have. He usually has a few ideas, and I have a few ideas, so we start from there.

The next thing I do is go through the food we have on hand. I try to make a couple of meals each week with things we have on hand that I bought on sale. That way we don't just let them sit on a shelf or in the freezer until they go bad.

Usually by this point I've got meal ideas for seven to ten days. The next thing I do is look through sales ads for the grocery stores. I generally don't find many things I want to make from them, though. My husband is military and the commissary doesn't have a weekly flyer. If I always shopped downtown, I would definitely pay close attention to the ads, though.

If there's not anything specific I see in the sales ads, I just pencil in a few more ideas. That way I have enough stuff on my grocery list to cook for two weeks, but if I find something else on sale, I can get it instead. I also usually leave a day or two blank, so we can eat leftovers of frozen pizza or something else easy. I do that in case I just don't feel like cooking, even with the menu plan.

One other thing I do, is to not assign a meal to any certain days most of the time. I wait until the night before and then decide. I just mark it off the list when I get the meat or whatever else out to thaw. This is especially helpful when my toddler is going through a picky stage. I can usually tell the night before, what kind of eater he is going to be the following day. Then I can either pick a food I know he will eat, or resign myself to the fact that it will be a grilled cheese day for him, and go ahead and make a meal he wouldn't eat anyway.

I've discovered that planning a menu for two weeks at a time really doesn't take that long. And it saves so much time and money. Only one trip to the grocery store means you are much less likely to impulse buy all that extra stuff that you don't need. And the time that it takes bundling up baby and getting him to and from the store can sometimes be quite a while. I definitely think it's better for my family to plan out our menus.