Meal Planning Help

You’ve cried and I am responding.

Meal planning can be tough.

Sometimes it is trying to come up with three meals a day to feed your family. Makes McDonald’s look really good. And hey, they will give your kid a toy with their meal.

Where do I start?

How do other people do it and make it work?

Will meal planning really bring me SANITY and help me manage my grocery budget?

Yes, yes, yes!

Here are a few sites to get you started.

1) Kraft Foods has an online recipe search that is totally awesome. I mean, totally!

How often do you have very specific ingredients leftover from a meal and you do not want them to go to waste? I have leftover fresh spinach (which is not cheap) and tons of penne pasta on hand that I need to use up.

Go to their website and type in 3 ingredients that you want to use. It generates a list of recipes.

How awesome is that? Check them out! Two of my recipes for this week came from this website!

2) Another place to start is an online blog I found a few months back that is dedicated to weekly meal planning.

There is a lady who loves to organize…. I did too, four children ago. (Man, life was so easy when I had one child!) She started a website/blog dedicated to her passion- Organizing Junkie. In turn, she has a section of her site just for weekly meal planning.

What she offers is a tool that allows people from all over the world to post links to their weekly meal plans on her site. Literally 200-300 people do this every single week.

I am serious!

Talk about tons of recipes at your fingertips that are tried and true and people are using and eating and liking.

Things are categorized on her site according to people’s needs.

For example, you have people whose meal plan is dedicated to Gluten Free diets.

Some are frugal spending and feeding large families on a strict weekly budget. One gal feeds a family of 6 on $60 for a week. Amazing!

Some people post weekly meal plans that are all slowcooker recipes.

Some menus are dedicated to batch cooking- like ‘Once A Month Cooking’ where you spend a day cooking and freeze it all to have it at your fingertips for the hustle and bustle of our busy school and work weeks.

It meets everyone’s needs. (I try to post my menus on her site each week as well. You can look for Crystal & Co and it will link you back to my blog.)

And every week these 200-300 people post a new menu.

3) Then, there is The Pioneer Woman (also known as PW).

She has a website/blog that has a section dedicated to cooking.

Good, down home, cooking!

She has beautiful step by step photographs to help you along the way. I love her site! And her cookbook. Could I possibly plug this woman on my blog any more?

Cook one of her meals and your husband will think you grew up country and love cast iron skillets. Her recipes will make you famous by your children! I am serious!

And, the recipes are all indexed in an organized fashion. So, if you are cooking breakfast one Saturday morning and wondering if you have everything on hand to make biscuits and gravy for breakfast, just type that into the search area and BAM, there you go!

What I like to do it sit down on Saturday or Sunday and go through these websites looking for meal plans that meet my needs for the upcoming week.

It really helps take the overwhelming feelings out of meal planning for so many people.

Besides, isn’t networking what we really love to do?

Virtual networking rocks! Give it a try.