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Plan your meals for a month to save time and be organized in the kitchen! 
  

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Monthly Meal Planning

by Rachel Paxton

After a busy day working at home or in the office, you're often not in the mood to figure out what to make for dinner. I tried planning for a couple of days, then a week, and finally a month! It may seem overwhelming at first, but the benefits are really worth the extra effort. 
  

If you sit down and think about it, you will find you probably make many of the same meals for your family, time and time again. How many times do you make a certain meal during a typical month? Write down all of the meals that you can think of right off the top of your head and how many times you prepare them during a month. A good portion of your list will already be complete. Try to think of meals using the same kinds of meats, so you can by family value packages of ground beef, chicken, pork chops, etc. You can also account for leftovers when you're making your list, or you will have several meals at the end of the month to carry over into the next month.

Hint: One way you can stretch out a meal is to make twice as much at one time and freeze the rest for another meal. Two meals in half the time!

After you have a complete listing of meals, make up a grocery list. Add some frozen and/or canned vegetables, rice, and pasta, to your list, and anything else that you normally eat that will store for up to a month or more, and you have your list.

The point of this exercise is not to only go grocery shopping once during the month. The goal is to have a month's worth of dinner main dishes on hand.

Monthly meal planning will also help your grocery budget. Savings will vary by family, but I found that in one monthly shopping trip I spent twice what I normally spend in two weekly shopping trips. Over the course of the month, I on the average spent less because my grocery list was considerably smaller every week and my menu was more organized, keeping me from buying unnecessary extra food.

I have found that I'm still going to the grocery store every week for milk, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, etc. You'll always be running out of something. For me the stress was not having to go to the store, but always trying to come up with new dinner ideas. Now I have a month's menu at my fingertips, and no excuse of not being able to come up with something for dinner

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