I have shared in a few blogs my lack of meal planning. Which in turn means I don’t always feed my family well…or at all. In fact, my children are frequently complaining about their mother not preparing dinner and yes, I do feel guilty about that.
As a housekeeper, I take my role as caring for the home and family very seriously. But let’s face it…I am human and I am imperfect. There are some areas that I do better in. But I also have those areas I really struggle with.
I have had good intentions about changing this but it wasn’t until I made a trip to an outlet store recently that I was able to finally put a meal plan in place. My husband and I had gone to breakfast in a small suburb of our city. I noticed that across the road in a strip mall was an outlet for “Taste of Home.”
“Taste of Home” offers cookbooks and a magazine that you can subscribe to. Many years ago I received their magazine and remember making lots of delicious meals. But I never renewed my subscription. So my husband and I decided to go over and take a look.
I ended up leaving not only with two cookbooks, one for “almost homemade dishes” and another for the slow cooker, but I left with a real plan. I knew exactly what I was going to do.
I am only into week two but the fact I have made it into a second week is quite a feat for me. Maybe this will help you as well if you struggle to get a good meal on the table. Or maybe you are tired of cooking the same things.
My plan has been to choose three new recipes each week. If I manage to do something other than pizza or cereal the other days, great…but right now I am striving for three days. If my family enjoys the meal, it’s a keeper. I am transferring the recipe from the book onto a recipe card (easier to find).
But I am going a step further. I also created a list that is categorized by types of meats. Under each type of meat I am listing a dish that we have tried and liked. The reason I decided to do this (and will be building on it each week) is because then I can get to a point where I pick up the sales ad for my favorite grocery store, look at which meat is on sale, and be able to easily find a recipe that calls for it.
Not only am I introducing three new meals each week but I am going to save money in the long run. I plan on doing three new meals for the remainder of the year (which will likely require another trip to the outlet store). A tall feat? Maybe. But so far I can tell you that my family is really happy about this meal plan.
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