This phrase when uttered mid afternoon in my house often makes me break out in a cold sweat of panic.
Thinking of something for dinner is one of the biggest hurdles I have to overcome each day.
First of all it has to be something everyone eats. If you count Abbey in this that means either pasta, vegemite sandwiches or two minute noodles. Then it has to be something that we haven't had in the past week because otherwise dinner will be greeted with groans of "Not again !!! We ate that last week." And it has to be reasonably healthy because I have somehow found five kilos in the last couple of months that I am keen to lose again.
I try to plan the week ahead's meals when I do my shopping every week. This sometime works but often I am so desperate for fruit, toilet paper, chocolate, etc that I have to shop before I have found time to do this. This then results in being completely unorganized, having to go to the supermarket every day and therefore spending way over the food budget for the week and still not knowing what to cook every day for dinner.
After reading on several blogs how other people plan their menus I came up with the idea of a monthly master menu that gets repeated. First of all I listed 24 meals that most of us enjoy. I listed 24 not 28 as my thinking was this gives us every Saturday night to either get takeaway, go out for dinner or try out a new recipe.
Then I used ical to plan which day we had each meal and set them to a 4 week rotation. Now on shopping day I just print out the calendar for that week, stick it on the inside of the pantry door so I can see what is for dinner at a glance and write a shopping list for the ingredients needed to make those meals.
I feel so organized.
Now I am thinking of creating 4 master shopping lists that I can print out and adjust accordingly depending on what we have left from the previous week. Now, if only I had an iphone I could get that list emailed to me each week on shopping day.
An iphone really would enrich and simplify my families' lives in so many ways.
David, are you reading this ?
Please ?
Lol.
