Organization 101 - Meal Planning and Freebies!!

I know it's been a few days since my last post... but with good reason! This post will surely make up for my little-tiny 'M.I.A-ness'. I don't know about you but one of my major resolutions for 2011 was organize our dinners. I wanted to create some sort of system. A meal plan system. You see, before I was always 'hey, what do you want for dinner?'... and would always end up with a quick and simple 'Um... I don't know' to which, in the end we would end up scraping through the cabinets only to make some pasta and red sauce... maybe with some turkey sausage. Well after 2010 ended I said to myself- 'Self... this year I want a plan. I am tired of the poor man meals. I want some scrumptious food and I am sure the entire family does as well'... and Self agreed.

Now of course im not knockin' the poor mans food. As you will see in this post... My meal plans are far from 'extravagant'. If anything they are quick, simple, easy and very much affordable. Of course without a plan it can be quite hard to create meals that fit into that 'Easy, quick and affordable' bracket [as I learned in 2010...heh...].

First, I bring out the stack of cookbooks. This isn't all of them but I could stand to lose a few so... the cooking light cookbooks are my favs. right now. Not only that, the majority, if not all, of the meals in these cookbooks are less than 30mins. for prep and cook. You might notice the weight watchers books. My step-mom is a weight watchers councilor... [or whatever you call them] and she hooked me up with all kinds of weight watcher books and goodies [step-moms are supposed to be 'evil' but seriously... mine is completely awesome!].

Note: Prep and cook-time on that soup. See?! Fast and easy [and healthy! :) ]

I run through the pages to look at what recipes I might want to add to our 2-week meal plan. As you can see... this one looks scrump-did-aly-umptious... and yes, it is on my meal plan for 2-7. And in case you weren't paying attention... if you look closely at the photo.. I pretty much gave you a recipe out of my cookbook :) ...but no that's not the freebie. The freebie I saved for last.

Some might think that cooking 'light' takes time and costs money. Well no... it doesn't. It can be just as quick as popping a frozen, loaded with salt and fake-ness, meal into the microwave and nuking it for 5mins. The photo above is for example. That's for a hearty fried chicken salad. Going by the 'light' recipe... you cut it down from 506 calories to 287 calories and in the end it's still tastes just as delicious as the 'original'.

As I find recipes I make my rough draft. I write down which recipes I will make on which corresponding day of the week.

Once I have all of my meals for 2 weeks, I take my bookmarks which are made out of some simple scrap paper and place them inside the page of my cookbook that the recipe is located.

As you can see the tops of my bookmarks have letters and numbers. Those letters stand for the day of the week and the numbers stand for which week. So if I have M-1, that basically tells me that, that recipe in which the bookmark is placed is for Monday of Week-1... and so on.

I write my Day-Numbers off to the side of my meal planning rough draft so I have something to go by when placing my bookmarks.

 Easy as pie!

Once I have my entire meal plan written out for my two weeks... I have to make my shopping list. I basically just go through the recipes and jot down items that I will need or think I might need. Some items I know for sure we already have, so of course I don't add those, but once my list is done I go food-shopping a-la my Fridge and cabinets. If I have something that I wasn't sure we had than I just cross it off the list.

 Once my final shopping list is complete, I type up a 'cleaner' version on Open-Office and print it out [FYI- Open Office is basically like Microsoft Office, but free].

While im at my computer printing off my typed up shopping list, I also print off 2 copies of my weekly dinner menus that I made up in Photoshop. Once those are printed off, I write down the meals [taken from my 'rough draft'] on each corresponding day of the week.

And last but not least is COUPONS! [and the crowd goes wild]. I basically just run through my coupons and go through which ones I will use for items on my shopping list and for any other 'etc' items I might buy while shopping [also depending if those 'etc' items are on sale]. This also gives me the chance to weed through expired coupons, or coupons that will expire before grocery day... to clean out my coupon holder.

And there you have it. My complete run down of how I plan meals for 2 weeks for my family. My busy family... I add my 2 dinner menu plans and shopping list to my clipboard. I hang my 'grocery' clipboard up on the wall in our newly organized office shelving nook. Once a new week starts, I take the first dinner menu off the clipboard and put it on the side of the fridge.

Josh has loved this whole concept. Now he doesn't have to ask me 'what's for dinner' anymore. He just reverts to the dinner plan to see what tasty goodness we will have cooked up for that night. But who cares what Josh thinks right!? It's time for some freebies!

Meal Planner 1

 Meal Planner 2

These are 2 meal planners that I made in Photoshop that I would like to share with you. All you have to do is click on the image, print, and Viola! They are sized 8.5x11, so you can easily save them to your files and re-size them if needed to.

And lastly... for what it's worth...I know when I talk about my new meal planning and grocery planning [complete with coupons] I get the 'Oh I don't have time for that' or 'How do YOU have time for that?!'. First and foremost.. you DO have time for it. I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything [I really just wanted to say 'toot'... it makes me giggle], but I am up at 4:30 every morning [in case you were wondering why you might have seen comments from me at 5AM... that's during my little 'coffee break' during my morning rush... but I know, you really weren't wondering, but just in case you were ;) ] I am out the door by 5:35AM with Jayden in tow. 40min. commute to daycare and work. Work all day and than I am home a little after 5PM... so between two days off on the weekend and some sort of time I might find after work... I do fit in a grocery list, coupons and meal plan for 2 weeks [I go shopping every other Friday]. It's very much possible and it has really been a life saver for sure. Before I went all anal, I was always scrambling and trying to figure out what to make, only to end up making something -not so good for you- or eating out. My first two weeks of meal planning and coupons I saved $75.00 and go without having to stop at the store for two whole weeks [where as before we were usually stopping on the way home to pick up one or two things because I never followed a list or... a plan!].

Now what say you? Do you meal plan? Do you use coupons? If you don't meal plan have you ever wanted to try and start meal planning?