Why You Need to Menu Plan (and how I do it)

It goes like this:

You get home from the grocery store and pull all of the rotten junk out of the refrigerator that you never got around to using last week. All the random vegetables that you bought because you knew you should make vegetables with your meals are now molded and unusable. You shake your head in disgust, throw them away, and put a brand new round of random foods into the fridge.

Dinner time comes and you're rummaging through all the random ingredients you purchased trying to come up with something that will taste halfway decent. You forgot one key ingredient to the lasagna you were thinking of making, but you don't realize it until halfway through your prep. time. You continue on with the whatever substitution you can find, but the result is less than stellar. Everyone eats a courtesy helping and the rest goes into the fridge. “We'll eat the leftovers for lunch” you half-heartedly tell yourself, knowing full well that you might as well just throw it away now. But alas, you allow the disfavored food to sit in the refrigerator until you spy a layer of fuzzy green growing on the top of your leftover lasagna.

“Someday I will get my act together” you think as you toss it into the trash. “I really need to start planning things out a little better.”

But here's the thing: Telling yourself you need to change and changing are two different things.

We all have good intentions, but intentions never get us anywhere unless we follow through.

Can I tell you about something that helped me start planning healthy (and frugal!) meals for my family?

It's called Build a Menu, and it works like this:

1. Choose the store where you'd like to shop (it even includes my favorite store – ALDI!)
2. Choose the recipes you want to make. You can plan out every meal of the day as well as snacks and even dessert if you want. And those on special diets needn't worry – they've got you covered too! Gluten free, Paleo, Trim Healthy Mama, Allergen Free…they've got it all!
3. As you select your recipes, a shopping list is automatically generating for you and tallying up your total. Each recipe is marked with its approximate cost, so if you go over-budget, you can go back and de-select something or switch out a more expensive recipe for a cheaper one.

That's it! You can drag and drop your recipes onto a weekly or monthly calendar if you like or just print the entire thing as a list and choose whichever one suits your fancy that day. The important thing is that you've planned for specific meals and shopped from a specific list.

No more buying random items and pulling them – rotten – from the fridge a week or two later!

You can give it a try with a free 2 week subscription.