Goal Accomplished!

I finally did it.  After a month and a half of having exactly one item on my to do list I finally accomplished said item.  I planned out dinners for the next two weeks.  I am absolutely horrible at planning meals. Horrible. And for the past several weeks/months we've been eating a late dinner after the baby is in bed that consists of whatever won't take too long to make. No more! For the next two weeks anyway. I've got a plan. I've got recipes, I've added the needed items to my shopping list, we WILL have dinner together as a family!

I use a google calendar to plan my meals. I can keep several calendars in one place and that way can see what we have going on and I can plan my meals accordingly. And since we only have two people who really eat the meals, most of what I make I can use as leftovers the next day, so I only plan 3-4 meals per week. We have plenty of "backup meals" like tuna helper in our food storage in case the day goes awry and the meal doesn't get cooked, or if we don't have the planned for leftovers. It makes it so much easier to only plan 3-4 dinners a week rather than 7.

I also started keeping a spreadsheet of meals I like to make.  I keep track of when we ate it last and where the recipe is kept.  That way I can take a quick look there to help plan my meals when I don't have time to hunt for recipes on Pinterest.

And can I just say thank goodness for Pinterest? When it comes to food I'm pretty visual, I like my recipes to have pictures. If I had to just browse my mostly pictureless cookbooks I would never decide what to eat. But thanks to pinterest and food bloggers, the internet is my cooking inspiration! What in the world did our moms do when it came time to feed all of us?!