After the advice from a few people I finally put together a dinner Menu for us and am officially testing it out to see how it goes. I printed a calendar from Ical and made dinner plans for the month of July (and part of June). I left a few free days and only planned the weekday dinners. Once I made the menu I worked on the grocery list for the 1st week. I am hoping that this will help with our grocery bill and NOT wasting food. We dont go through food fast enough and we tend to just buy something because it sounds good at the time and then never end up eating it. Also food items such as salad fixings go to waste too fast. So plan is in action and I am hoping I can stick to it. I have the monthly calendar in the front of a binder that I made with Recipes also in sleeves in it. But for fun I hung this board up in our Kitchen with the weeks menu. I have made little cards with "Whats for Dinner". On the back of the card it has the recipe if needed or the page number where to find it...and what is "needed" for it. I will reuse the cards and this should make the grocery shopping list a lot faster. We also thought the board would give us a little flexibility if we wanted to swap cards on a day if something did not sound good. The other goal in all this....I want to be able to cook and have dinner ready by 6. Then our evenings can be spent having family time with Lily not trying to cook after Dan gets home and trying to decide what to eat. Thanks to everyone who has emailed or contacted me with fun recipes. I will post results! Also I will still take more if anyone has any? Trying to not eat the same thing every week is also a challenge :)
Here are a couple of pics of the board I hung in the kitchen (iphone pics...not the best quality)..
~Whitney