Monday’s Menu Plan for the Week

I just finished up our menu plan for the week and I thought I would share it with you. This week looks very different from most. We will have 9 children living with us this week. There are very few vegan meals on the menu this week. I am not sure what the new kids will like to eat. I don’t know if they are picky eaters. I sure hope not! But I decided to make a very typical ( I think) kid friendly menu this week. I make a menu every Sunday night for the upcoming week. I usually check the freezer and pantry to see what I have and start there. Any items that I don’t have to complete the meal are loaded on to my grocery gadget app on my phone.  A lot of times I will look through cookbooks and get new meal ideas and I also ask the kids what they would like.  Friday is our cooking lesson day so the kids normally pick what they would like to learn to make for that week. I also keep in mind the days that I take classes or the kids have sports, church nights, etc.  and plan easier meals or ones that can be cooked and then kept warm in the oven or crock pot on those days. The crock pot is my friend.

I love the weekly menu plan system because I don’t have to think much about what I am going to make. The thinking is just planning it out. When it is time to cook you just check the menu and get to it. I am not a morning person, therefore my brain is not really functioning at its optimum capacity at breakfast time so it tends to be the easiest meal of the day.

A few more reasons I love making a weekly menu:

My kids know what to expect. They don’t ask me a million times a day what they are going to have for breakfast/lunch/or dinner.  The big kids will often without being asked jump in and help out with snacks because they know what they can have. Oh, and usually we follow the plan pretty strict except the snacks, I only put that one there to have a running list of what we have that week. The kids can choose any snack they wish on any day. It doesn’t have to be the one written on that day.

I have very little food spoil. Because I base the menu on what we already have I am not throwing away foods that get overlooked.  That saves us quite a bit of money especially because we eat mainly organic foods. Once I realized how much money I was saving, it motivated me to be better about throwing over-ripe produce in the freezer (for smoothies) or in the dehydrator instead of letting it go to waste. It makes me feel good to not be wasteful.

I can easily see if we are eating a somewhat balanced diet. Most weeks we eat more vegan meals and I want to make sure the kids are getting all the nutrients they need.

Making a weekly plan for our menu me feel a little more in control. I like being super organized. It makes things go much more smoothly around here. There are so many things I can’t control. You know, the washer breaks down, you have an unexpected trip to the ER,  the car gets a flat, the kids get sick… all of that is out of my hands. If I had to try to figure out what we are going to have for dinner an hour before time, after a day of all the other little unexpected bumps, with starving kids whining about starving to death, I think I might just lose it. Planning ahead helps turn that “crunch” time into a relaxed time that you can hang in the kitchen with your kids and enjoy the time with your family.