Monthly Meals

Each month I am going to "try" to post a month worth of menus for my family's evening meals. This will include 5 meals per week, leaving 2 open for leftovers or restaurants. Not only does meal planning get Donna's stamp of approval, it is also a great tip for saving time, money, and Calories. Although the planning stage for this process is very timely (took me about 3 hours to gather recipes and compile a grocery list for the month- lucky for you, you could just skip this part and copy mine); once the menu is posted I can prepare for my weekly grocery trip in a snap. I also save time during food preparation because I can often prep for some dishes while I am preparing for others. For example, if I was going to have Mexican Chicken Pizza and Chicken Tortilla Soup in the same month, I would prepare the chicken for both dishes at the same time and then freeze the chicken for the second meal until time to prepare that recipe.

I save money by stockpiling my ingredients as they go on sale throughout the month. For example, if I know that I am going to have 5 chicken dishes in a month, I will wait until the chicken goes on sale and then buy enough chicken to cover all 5 meals. It also saves me money because when I pre-plan for meals and even pre-prepare some meals I am much less likely to go out to eat which not only saves money but also brings us to our last benefit- saves you Calories.

Eating at home can easily save you half the Calories, fat, sugar, sodium, etc. etc. etc. then eating a similar dish at a restaurant. (Restaurant Eating is a soapbox I would love to stand on for a while but rather I will save it for a future "Wellness Wednesday" post.) If you choose to copy my menu for the month let me warn you- not all my recipes are necessarily "diet" choices but all can easily fit into a healthy meal plan. Each week I do try to plan for at least 1 chicken dish, 1 fish dish, and 1 meatless dish and I try to limit "heavy" recipes to no more than 1 a week.

At this time the recipes will not be posted until the respected week they will be eaten, however as I start to repeat recipes (thus have them saved on the blog and can just reference them) I will try to provide them with the Monthly menu post. Does that make sense? Hope this helps! I would love some feedback!