Monthly Menu Planning
Today in the Sparrow Parents Podcast we talked about monthly meal planning. And because this is such a visual thing, I thought I’d create a post about it, too! One thing I didn’t really get in to in our podcast episode was how to post your menu for your family to see. Of course, there are all kinds of ways you can do this, from a physical menu on the wall to an electronic way of communicating the menu on your shared calendar. You may have seen my post our monthly menus before, either on Social Media or here on my blog (I posted our September menu in my last blog post - it’s been a while since I blogged). If you have seen one or more of those, you know that I use a dry erase calendar for our menu. It hangs in the dining room (which is connected to our kitchen) so everyone can see what’s for dinner each night. Because I’ve been doing this for a while, we are pretty good at sticking to the menu each night. I’ve also gotten pretty quick at writing our menu, and I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve that I’m going to share with you today!
Menu planning is a ministry to your family because it creates space for more family time, more money for family activities, and more peace during an already tense time of day.
Writing a dinner menu for the whole month can seem like a very daunting task. And I’ll be honest with you, the first few times you do this, it will be hard. But it gets easier!! Truly, it does. You start to get into a rhythm, and you get to know what meals your family really likes a lot and will want every month. So, I have 5 steps for planning your monthly meals. Now, many of these steps will be applicable to you if you are doing a weekly meal plan, too. So take my experience and, as always, apply it to your own reality.
The first step is to Look at the Calendar.
You don’t want to plan to cook a really elaborate meal for the family on a day when you have to work late, or your kids have a sporting event, or nobody’s going to be home for dinner. So look at your calendar, and immediately put the easiest meals on the days when things will be a little more rushed.
Examples of easy meals in our family would include:
- Take Out or ordering pizza
- Frozen meals / TV Dinners
- Pasta
- Chicken Nuggets and French Fries
- Pasta Chicken Dinner
- Popcorn and carrot sticks
- Leftovers
These are the easy, we-just-need-to-feed-everyone-tonight kind of meals. And it’s nice to have about one of these meals a week. Because even if there’s not a night this week that is going to be a little crazed, it’s really nice to have a night off from cooking dinner. Throw something in the oven and call it good, so you can get some extra time playing with the kids, or vegging out to your favorite show, or getting some extra household chores done.
The next step in monthly menu planning is to Choose a Theme for Each Day.
This one sounds weirder than it is, I just couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it. By “theme” I mean beef, chicken, pasta, vegetarian… When you are meal planning for the whole month at a time, this makes it SO much easier! So, every day of the week has a certain protein or theme which dictates what you will serve that day. That way, when you think of a specific meal, let’s say Chicken and Rice, you can automatically put it in the column where it belongs – whether that’s chicken or casserole or crockpot. However you decide to do it. Here are some examples of what we do:
- Taco Tuesday (that makes planning Tuesdays really easy)
- Soup day – especially in the fall and winter months
- When we do soup days, the next day we always have leftover soup and a special bread – so the bread will be what’s on the menu, but we know we’ll be eating the rest of the soup from yesterday.
- Chicken / Beef / Pasta / Pork
- Crockpot (this is usually on a day when I know I will be working late, but will have extra time in the morning to set the crockpot)
- In the summertime, we often grill every Saturday
- Fingerfoods
Step three is to Ask the Family.
Once you figure out your theme for each day, it becomes really easy to put your meals in to the menu. So, to fill in my menu, after I have done these first two steps, I ask the family what they want to eat this month. As they call out their favorite meals, I enter them into the menu where it makes sense. So, if my son wants pizza one night, I’ll put that on the weekday that it fits my theme that month.
My family tends to help me out with the same meals every month. I always hear “Pizza!” called out several times, chicken and rice makes the list, and I might get another couple of ideas off of my clan. Once everyone has lost interest, though, I am still left with quite a few empty spaces on our calendar. So that’s when I move on to my next step: Open the Cookbook.
Once everyone has shared their ideas for the menu, I take a look at my Pinterest board. Back in 2018, I got into the habit of trying one new recipe a week. I really loved this, and I found most of our new recipes through Pinterest. So now we have a larger pool of recipes to pull from, and I feel more accomplished about spending time on Pinterest.
If you don’t use Pinterest for recipes, you can open up your cookbook or a favorite website or magazine where you have recipes saved. Make sure you understand what is involved in each of these recipes you are adding to your menu, though. One of our new favorite recipes came to us from me seeing a picture on Pinterest and assuming it was a crockpot recipe. I put it on the menu for our Crockpot day, only to find out that morning that it was a very involved stovetop recipe. I decided to go for it that day anyways, and we loved it, but I was very disappointed that I couldn’t just throw it in the crockpot that morning.
If you’re still having trouble filling in those last few squares on your menu, take a look at what you’ve already written in to your menu, choose the family favorites, and write them in again. That’s the last step in writing the menu plan. There’s no reason why you can’t have the same meal twice in one month – especially when you are just starting out this process.
Once your menu is written for the month, do your very best to stick to it. Grocery shop for the menu. Let that menu work for you. Remember that you wrote it for a reason! You could even write that reason next to your menu, so you remember it at those especially stressful moments between the kids getting home from school and dinner time. But then, on the days when things get away from you and you end up ordering pizza, give yourself some grace. Nobody’s perfect, and we can’t plan for everything.
Happy Menu Planning!!