I’ve attached our handout, a monthly menu scheduler, a weekly scheduler and a meal journal page.
Week 2 handout.docx
This handout includes recipes for chicken pot-pie, blueberry pie, and a short list of discussion topics for the dinner table.
Monthly Meal Plan
This monthly menu scheduler is very blank.
- The yellow boxes are for you to plot the days of the month. The larger gray and white boxes are for things happening on your family calendar. This will help you plan the meals more efficiently. If you know only two out of six family members will be home one night, you probably don’t need to plan to cook. Just plan for what the two of you like.
- The darker blue section is to write in your nightly theme, such as Mexican Night. You would then fill in the blanks in the light blue section with a meal corresponding with that theme. So the first week you might serve Taco Salad, the next week on that same night, you could have enchiladas, and on down through the month. The next night of the week you might want Breakfast foods, so you’d choose four or five breakfast-for-dinner meals and plot them into the weeks accordingly.
- The light blue boxes are for the meals themselves.
weekly menu blue
This Weekly scheduler is for you to plan your grocery list. Plot the meals from your monthly schedule in the boxes corresponding to the day of the week, and then list what grocery items you will need in the large box on the left. Don’t limit that list to only food items, use it for all the things you need to pick up that week.
Meal Journal.xlsx
The meal journal is a way to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. If you do this regularly and keep up with it accurately, you’ll build a treasure you can offer yourself on those days when you feel like you’re in a rut. Go back a few months and look at what you fixed on those pages and you’ll see something you haven’t done in a while and how well it was received. I have lists of meals from years ago on my computer, and I love going back and seeing something I had forgotten about and reintroducing it into our menu.
That brings me to my last point, which is using the computer. I love using paper, but I hate having it around to keep track of, so I only print out what I’m using and I keep track of everything on the computer in Excel or Word. All three of these scheduling and meal journal PDFs are on my computer in Excel. If you would like a copy that you can manipulate for yourself, please comment below, and I’ll email it to you.