Menu Monday + My New Found Love

It is the revival of the Menu Monday! And this week I am excited to share with you my new and improved method for meal planning.

For me meal planning is a kind of necessary evil that I have to do each week to ensure I eat good, real food and not take out every day. When I don't meal plan effectively I go to the grocery store and shop pretty aimlessly, often resulting in large grocery bills and a really weird assortment of food (who put those honey dew ice pops in there? dang I was craving cheese curds again? What is this odd rice puff thingy? what do I cook with this again?)

My recent method to meal plan has been using a  website called Plan to Eat. It lets you drag and drop your recipes into a schedule, and then neatly generates your shopping list by grocery store section. It also makes adding your recipes super simple -- I added most of mine in a few hours. You can enter them in or "pin" them from websites sort of like pinterest.  It also syncs with my google calendar, lets me share recipes with friends, and lets me manage what is in my "pantry". I usually plan on my laptop then use it on my iphone when in the grocery store to check off items and while cooking to reference recipes.

Anyway, if you can't tell... I am in LOVE with this new tool and recommend anyone who is about "optimizing" house tasks to check it out. They let you do a free 30 day trial, so you should check it out!

 Here is a screen shot of my plans and you can see this week and next week.

We have pretty much already spent our grocery budget for the month (why does this always happen?) so we are mostly eating from our freezer supply and pantry for the next two weeks. We also have pretty busy schedules so most of our meals are "easy" meals (did I mention you can tag your recipes too in PTE? Way convenient!)

Anyway - Happy eating this week. Are you making anything good? Do you meal plan? If so, what is your "method"?