11/22 Weekly Menu
22. Nov, 2009 
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One of the best things I’ve implemented in the last year is to plan a weekly dinner menu. The weekly menu helps me in a number of ways:
1) It lets me grocery shop in advance, rather than stopping at the store every day for just one or two items I need for each meal.
2) It helps me utilize what I have that needs to be used or can be used.
3) If I have a plan that I know I can follow, my family is more likely to get a meal than told “grab a sandwich”. And I’m a lot less likely to say we’re ordering pizza or eating out, if I have it all planned in advance. I hate thinking of meals last minute, so if I plan ahead, I know when in my day I need to prep or start something, rather than realizing at 3pm that I have no idea what’s for dinner!
This has become even more important as Brianna has started adding weekly evening activities to her schedule. On Mondays and Wednesdays she has swimming and gymnastics respectively, so I know that I won’t be home to put dinner in the oven/take it out, so I can plan to have crockpot meals those days, or leftovers. Some days, I will leave a blank in my menu mid to late week, if I want to try to take advantage of whatever sale they’ll be having at the grocery store, whose sales change on Wednesdays.
One thing about the weekly menus, though, is that they’re adaptable. I would guess I often have one day a week that I change, because something in our schedule, groceries or motivation changed. Last week, for instance, I had planned leftovers for Wednesday, but Monday’s leftovers got left on the counter (I was so sad!) and Tuesday’s meal was a complete fail. So I had to come up with a meal for Wednesday. Don’t feel like your menu planning is failing if you have to change on the fly, just look at it as a guideline rather than an absolute.
Jane said she’d like to have a weekly menu thread, and since Sundays are the day I plan my menu, I’ll be sharing mine here on (most) Sundays. My menus run from Sunday to Saturday. Please share yours in the comments!
Sunday: Hashbrown ham quiche (I have leftover ham that needs to be used. I’ll make this and freeze the rest of the ham for a future meal).
Monday: Burritos w/spanish rice (usually this would be a crockpot meal, but I made and froze carnita meat a few weeks ago, so I only need to throw it in the oven to heat it)
Tuesday: Parmesan-crusted tilapia (frozen, from Sam’s club), green beans, baked potatoes and fresh bread
Wednesday: Alfredo w/chicken, salad and leftover bread
Thursday: Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving gets a menu of its own so we’ll do a separate post to talk about Thanksgiving.
Friday: Leftovers. I’m shopping on Black Friday NOT cooking.
Saturday: Turkey Tetrazinni (I’m sure I spelled that wrong)
One thing I want to say about this menu is that it only has one day of leftovers. Often my menu has two days of leftovers, some days I actually plan ahead to eat out. But a lot of times these days, we don’t have leftovers for dinner because 1) with another person in the house, there are no leftovers or 2) that other person (my brother) and I eat them for lunch. So don’t feel like you must have a new meal every day. Use your leftovers for another meal! Ready? Your turn!
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I started doing weekly meal planning because I tend to overbuy without a plan – I’ll grab every gorgeous vegetable at the grocery without any clue how it will make it to the plate.
So, it helps me not to waste, and it does make me less of a witch in the witching hour! I plan 6 meals, but not to the day they’ll be on. Day 7 is leftovers, or eating out, but usually a meal at the in-laws or a friends house.
1 – roast chicken, potatoes, peas
2 – peanut pasta with veggies and leftover chicken
3 – kung pao chicken with jasmine rice
4 – spaghetti & meatballs
5 – carmelized onion mac & cheese
6 – Thanksgiving
I am woefully bad at the weekly plan.
Mostly because I plan, then get there and am too lazy to do that day’s plan. lol.
I really like the weekly menu idea and need to get better with it. A good money and time saver.
Elise, that does happen to me too! Some days are just so long that by the time dinner rolls around, I don’t want to move in order to cook. But having the menu idea and ingredients does make it that much easier to get motivated.
Weekly planning doesn’t work for me at all; my tastes and schedule are too mercurial. Instead, I make huge batches of tasty things–chicken soup, lamb stew, Thai green curry–and freeze them in single-meal portions. Then there’s always a variety to choose from and I can go with whatever suits my fancy.
I love weekly planning. Since I’ve started this, I’ve been able to use coupons and save more money (which gets set aside in a ‘fun’ account).
Monday – 12 minute pork chops, steamed green beans, potatoes
Tuesday – spaghetti with meat sauce (sauce is made in one large batch and frozen in 2 serving containers)
Wednesday – chicken with rice, salad
Thursday – Thanksgiving, but usually sloppy joes as that’s grocery shopping night.
Friday – weekly pizza night, we’re too tired to go out.
Saturday – eat out
Sunday – soup night, with fresh bread. (The rule is homemade for this dinner. We generally have cream of carrot, shrimp & corn chowder, or mulligatawny soup)
I need to start doing this. I also need to do a better job with coupons. Our Sunday paper usually has a weekly menu plan that can be used verbatim or as inspiration.
We used to save SO much money with couponing, Annmarie. There are a ton of blogs that are dedicated to shopping the sales with coupons. You could never pay for things like toothpaste and deodorant again.
Rose, sometimes I change up my meal plan if something just does not appeal to me. Like I said, my plan is flexible but if I didn’t have one at all, my family would eat nothing but sandwiches!
Hey, Victoria, what kind of bread do you usually make?
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/french-style-country-bread-recipe
If the link doesn’t work, it’s called “French Style Country Bread”. You can make it the old fashioned way or in a bread maker.
I’ve been having good luck with this recipe for a while – I make the starter on Saturday morning and let it sit on the counter until Sunday evening. The crust is crisp but the inside is very soft, with the holey texture that catches a lot of butter!
Thanks for sharing that link, Victoria. I’m going to save it!
I have done weekly menus in the past–I can do 30-minute burritos, so I seldom do those crockpot. Carnitas take longer. Carne guisada–I could do that in the crockpot. Also green chili stew. Made gumbo Sat. w/bratwurst, believe it or not, and frozen shrimp. Would’ve been better w/boudin sausage, but you go with what you’ve got.
Part of my problem is that the fella is gluten free, so I can’t do pasta stuff in a casserole like the tetrazzini (tho we get care pckges with Trader Joe’s brown rice pasta from the daughter in Pittsburgh. We’re in Galveston, TX, and the nearest Trader Joe’s is in Memphis…) I do sauce & pasta separately, so I can make rice for the fella to eat with his Alfredo or marinara sauce.
It’s nice, tho that we’re Texans, so we already eat a lot of corn & rice–love cornbread, corn tortillas, etc. Anyway– I think if I did more planning, we could take more advantage of the fresh seafood available. I still have a huge hunk of mackerel in the freezer the son’s friend caught and gave to us. (We already ate about half of it.) I need to make a list, so I can remember to marinate it… This piece of fish is about 10″x12″ and 4 in. thick…Huge.
I tried menu planning with a meal chosen for each day of the week. I failed miserably. As someone mentioned above, I would find myself too tired to cook that day’s meal, and so I’d end up ordering out instead. Of course, not planning at all leads to the same thing. (I am LAZY.)
So now I plan ahead by picking four or five dishes I’d like to make that week, I buy the items for those dishes, and then I put a list up on the refrigerator of the meal options. Then, each evening, I figure out what the next day’s schedule is and what I’m likely to have time to make. It works a lot better for me than trying to figure out what I’m going to have the energy to make a week in advance.
Victoria, thanks so much for the link to the bread recipe. For the first time in years I am thinking of making time to baake my own bread again.