Summary: In this episode we're chatting about meal planning. Some things that have worked for our family and some tools that might be able to help you save time, money, sanity, reduce your decision fatigue and never get caught with the 4p, "oh crap what am I going to make for dinner" bug. We chat about what has worked for us regarding breakfast lunch and dinners but most importantly, a tool I stumbled upon 2.5 years ago that has helped me so much in the kitchen and meal planning aspect of my homemaking! Plan to Eat, a meal planning website!$39/year ($3.25/month)**50% off sale November 26-Dec 2nd, 2018 (I think they do this sale every week after Black Friday, FYI) which makes it only $19/year (1.60 a month) Simple Menu Planning Keep it simple - follow a themed template each week. For example, we use this as a genreral plan for our week: Mondays - Italian, Tuesdays - Mexican, Wednesdays Leftovers, Thursdays Crock Pot Meal, Friday's Leftovers, Saturdays Homemade Pizza & Movie Night, Sunday - Meal Prep and Grilling. Plan to Eat does all of the dirty work behind meal planning, recipe storage and creating shopping lists. Recipe Mode Input recipes either by link or you can manually add your own. This means you can go to Pinterest, get the link on a blog or website, and import it right away - pictures and all into a recipe card in your account. It saves forever. Menu Planning ModeDrag and drop your recipes into a monthly or weekly planning calendar. Plan notes like leftovers or go out to eat or date night. Print and keep handy in your planner or on the fridge. Shopping ModeClick over to the shopping list and this website will auto populate your shopping list and separate everything by store category. You can even add "staples" to your list like toilet paper, diapers, formula, shampoo and it will show up every time you create a shopping list. You can go one step further and designate which stores you buy certain items from. For us, all meat generally comes from Sam's Club - so when I click "shop" my grocery list will come up as a Normal Store (Walmart, Kroger, etc) and Sam's Club. I then either walk around with my lap top or print the pages out and walk around the kitchen marking off everything we already have. Shop list says I need 16 chicken breasts but I already have 8 in the freezer, so I just mark that down to only needing 8. Spices, condiments, etc.Then I just print the list out and give it to the hubby to go get OR order everything online and pick it up. Seriously a lifesaver. You can copy entire months worth of recipes. Or a week. You can schedule everything from dinners to lunches, breakfasts and snacks. I will say, there is a little learning curve - mostly because websites, blogs and recipes will not always have their ingredients typed the same way. If you put boneless chicken breast in one recipe and chicken breast in another they'll show up under "meats" on your shopping list as 2 different items. There is an easy fix, you can alter whichever one you don't like and the software will prompt you to see if you want to make the change in your shopping list AND your every recipe this item is in. Don't forget to hook up with me and some other mamas! My Instagram and Facebook pages @HolyHotMessMom our exclusive mama Facebook group - HolyHotMessMamas If you're looking forward to more episodes then hit that subscribe button so you get notified every time we release a new episode! As always, if you've got ideas of topics you'd like to hear on the podcast please send an email to podcast@holyhotmessmom.com
