What's For Dinner?

After 3 days in a row of digging through the cupboards trying to scrounge up food for dinner, I decided that I needed to start menu planning again. I am generally pretty good about it, but I have slacked recently because it seemed like we ate the same boring things all the time. I decided that I needed a new and more efficient way to plan.

That is when I turned to Pinterest! {Allow me a brief aside for a moment... Pinterest has totally renewed my love of crafting. I am not very creative and original, so I have a hard time coming up with my own projects. I am, however, really good at recreating someone else's idea with my own special touches. Pinterest is awesome because there are so many great ideas that I can pick and choose from. LOVE!}

I found a very cute and super efficient menu planner a few weeks ago, and knew that it would be perfect. I set out to make my own modeled after the one found here. After a few hours of work (over a couple of days), it is finished, and I LOVE IT!

Here are some of the great things about this method:

1. All of our favorite and most used meals (I have about 65 cards at the moment) are all together and so easy to flip through for meal ideas. They are stored in the little boxes, and now there is no more digging through 5 different cookbooks to plan the weekly menu!
2. On the back of each card is a list of the ingredients that are needed. When I plan my menu for the week, I can just flip over the cards and make my grocery list right then.
3. I printed where each recipe can be found on the front of the card, so when I go to make that meal, I know exactly where to find it. For example: "Thai Stir-Fry" is found in BHG (Better Homes and Gardens) pg. 470.
4. It is flexible. I created a card for "eating out" and a couple of blank ones that I can write on with dry-erase marker if I want to try something new.

So here are just a couple of tips on how I made it:

*I typed up all of our commonly used meals in a Word table. On one side of the table was the name of the meal and where the recipe was found, and on the other side of the table I typed out the ingredients. This was the longest part of the project. Jonathon and I sat down with all of our cookbooks, and he read me the ingredients while I typed. The whole thing took about 1 1/2 hours, but it is so worth it to have all of the meals together now. (To make it fit in such a small space, it is only ingredients, not full recipes)

Then I folded the papers over, laminated them, and cut them out.

For the actual menu board, I used an old picture frame and some scrapbooking paper to cover the cardboard. The little boxes are crayon boxes with one side cut out, covered in scrapbooking paper, and then covered with contact paper so they can be wiped clean if needed.

The clothespins are covered in matching paper and then mod-podged. Then they are glued to the side of the frame using hot glue. Making the actual board was easy and didn't take long at all. More detailed instructions can be found here.

Yay! I am excited to plan meals again. Now I just have to actually make the food!