What's for dinner???

 Most people dred this question every night, I used to dread it too. It's not easy to work all day long and then get home and be hungry and then have to figure out what you are going to make to feed your family. Every night when we first moved in together, Michael and I use to go back and forth with, "What do you have a taste for?", "What do you want to eat?". It was grueling; and then we probably would just give up and go out to eat. So that's why I decided to start planning weekly menus.

It just makes life easier. I've mentioned before that every Sunday Michael and I go to breakfast and while we're there we plan our menu and then make our grocery list based off of the menu. We also bring the Sunday paper with us and check the flyers for Jewel and see if there are any coupons we can use. It's really efficient and it works for us.

I think there are two main benefits to menu planning: 1) You always know what you are going to make for dinner. I will say that we don't always make what's on the menu on the assigned day, sometimes we change the order depending on if we have a taste for something else that day. 2) It saves a lot of money. We only buy the items we need to make the meals on our menu that week. If you go into the store with no plan, list, or menu you usually just buy what looks good and you end up buying a lot more than you need and then most of it ends up going to waste. The only thing we will usually buy that is not necessarily part of the menu is meat. If chicken is on sale for instance for $1.99 a pound, I will buy 12 or 15 pounds and then individually freeze the chicken breasts for upcoming weeks. Anytime meat that we like is on sale I usually try to buy a lot of it so we have it for a couple of months. I also try to plan my menus according to what meat I have in the freezer so it gets used up and then we don't have to buy meat every week

So how do I decide what is on the menu? Well I love to cook of course and we have our favorite dishes that I make regularly, but then I rely heavily on a lot of the blogs I read. I use my Google Reader to read all of my blogs so I can star and catalog any good recipes that come along. When we're in the need of some new recipes, I go to my Google Reader and pick something new to try.

Menu planning really works for us and takes the stress out of that dreaded, "What's for dinner?" question.

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