3-Month Menu Planning and Food Storage

The last few weeks, I've been dedicating my time to planning and organizing a three-month menu. So, where do you start? I have done this before and pretty much just did one month and multiplied the ingredients by three months. But that's not how we eat - the kids (and me) get too bored.

I found a website through a friend (thanks Teresa!): http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/2009/06/29/babystep-3-three-month-food-supply-revised/ - halfway down the page, there is a spreadsheet. I started to populate the spreadsheet that they provided, but I wanted to change it slightly.

Note: I get overwhelmed by too many choices. What should I make for lunch, snacks, dinner? How many recipes should I keep readily available? What ingredients should I have on hand? etc. etc.

First step: I grouped the lunches, snacks and dinners by each day of the week so that I could narrow down my choices for each day. For now, this is how I have everything broken out:

Monday

• Lunch: calzones (or similar item such as Pizza Muffins)
• Snack: fruit or yogurt
• Dinner: chicken or fish

Tuesday

• Lunch: canned items or soup (ravioli, spaghettios, chicken noodles, beef stew, etc.)
• Snack: granola
• Dinner: noodles

Wednesday

• Lunch: meat (corn dogs, hot dogs jellyfish, chicken wings, etc.)
• Snack: frozen treat
• Dinner: soup or salad

Thursday

• Lunch: sandwiches
• Snack: chips & dip
• Dinner: beef or pork

Friday

• Lunch: wraps
• Snack: sweet treat
• Dinner: pizza

Saturday/Sunday

• Lunch: leftovers
• Snack: leftovers
• Dinner: casserole or big dinner (like roast)

Second step: I have about 110 recipes, including a couple breakfast recipes. It allows you to put in the recipe ingredients so that you can do a total for shopping. This is the most time consuming part, but it's nice to have them all in one place. I'm seriously thinking about getting rid of most of my cookbooks. (I also made individual recipe cards so that I don't have to flip through books, but that goes a little far and isn't required at all.)

Third step: By adding all these recipes, it allows me to have a variety of recipes per month without duplicating everything three times. I added an additional calculation that would let me duplicate a single recipe for the ones the kids like a lot (like lasagna).

Conclusion: Now I have a quick and easy way to figure out my grocery shopping list AND to know what I should have in my food storage. I'm pretty excited about this because I've had a hard time getting started (once again, overwhelmed with where to start and too many choices).

Here's a quick screen shot of what it looks like. I love it! (I'm not consistent, but love the results when I do it.)

Planning a Menu

So, planning a menu has alluded me for so many years. I have tried to do this many times, but have not been very persistent. So why do it? THAT is what I'm learning now...

#1 - it helps you when at 4:30PM, you say "what should I fix for dinner" before you have to head out the door at 6:30 to some activity

#2 - it gives you an idea of what are the ingredients you should put in food storage

#3 - it gives you the opportunity to tell your kids, when they say they don't like dinner, "you chose dinner on X day and your sibling chose for today" eat this and then you'll get what you want :)

#4 - it sure helps to make a grocery list - especially for those odd ingredients

#5 - it allows kids to have ownership in what is chosen each day - we have even had our kids help us cook the meal they've chosen (we need to get back to doing that again)

Overall....definitely a keeper concept that we are using in our family!