Meal Schedule

I recently made up a calendar of every meal for every day for an entire month. I figured that we could follow this food schedule and then just repeat it each month. I did a WHOLE BUNCH of shopping and just multiplied the things I'd need over the next few months. Which has been a big help to get food storage and meals done.

So NOW, I know what's for dinner!

I am going to share some of my tips, calendar, and recipes in posts to come. Hopefully it will help someone else.

So here is what I've done. I figured out Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner for each day, (figured how much we eat on weekdays, the kids and I, then on weekends remembered to count daddy.) I'm super luck to have such generous and helpful parents and they have all of they're kids over every Sunday night and have dinner. So you may need to think of an extra meal. I usually have a "fill in meal" for those nights you didn't remember to put it in the crock pot or you just don't feel like making the chosen meal of the day. I have a bag of frozen pot stickers for our "fill in meal" it's easy and yummy and no one minds the "fill in meal." We have left over night on Monday's because it usually works best for us on that day. You may need to move it to a different day. And if you have no left overs, that is a "fill in meal" night. I also keep cans of soup handy which also makes for a good "fill in meal."

*These meals are what we normally eat, but I think I would like to implement more meals that have more 'food storage' ingredients.

I made the calendar first and then figured out what I'd need for each meal for the whole month. This may be different for your family. We have two adults and two small kids in our family. I'd say try to stick with the schedule for a week and see how much food your family eats and then calculate the numbers according to your family. It was a lot of work but it was worth it. These are meals I know my family likes and will eat. If you don't like the meals you may want to make up your own using mine as a guide. Here is a tip if you have your menu for an entire month you can watch the deals and sales on the meats you buy and then stock up. I have all my meat frozen and I can either stick it in the crock pot frozen or since I know what the weeks meals are I can thaw it.

Don't forget snacks: yogurt (I freeze mine), cheese, crackers, pretzels, pudding, Jell-O, apple salad, frozen/can fruit, muffins, cookies (make a batch every once in a while freeze the dough and you have a few cookies whenever you want them), cake, vegetables, raisins. I didn't calculate real specifically on the snacks.