Menu planning is, not surprisingly, something I've done before but I'm hit or miss. I'll do it consistently for a while and then stop. I do find I'm much less stressed about cooking when I menu plan, but I also find I spend more time cooking when I plan, since I plan more complicated meals. Since I enjoy cooking, that's not usually a problem.
Somehow last week I stumbled back upon Plan to Eat, a web-based menu planning service. Unlike many online options, it doesn't provide you with menus, but instead offers an interface whereby you enter your own recipes and then plan your own menu for the week. There are a few things I *love* about this site.
One is that you start out with a blank slate. I have a couple hundred recipes in my current recipe software and I'm not interested in being helpfully provided with hundreds more that I'm not sure I'll like.
Second is how easy it is to add recipes from websites. Almost every recipe I've tried to import using their one-click system has worked almost perfectly. Manually entering is (of course) a bit more tedious, but not terrible.
Third, and what my previous software was missing, is an easy interface to menu plan. It's drag and drop, and you can even easily 'queue' recipes to use when you're doing up your plan. Something I didn't think I would use at first was the option to save a menu. But, when I started thinking about it, I decided to save a weekly menu for breakfasts and snacks, since they tend to be pretty constant.
When I shared the link on Facebook last week to see if any friends already use it (you can have 'friends' on Plan to Eat just like on Facebook, and you can see their recipes), a friend pointed me to this blog post. Kat, the person who writes that blog, is having a meal planning boot camp based on Plan to Eat this week.
All that to say, it only made sense to choose the 'Start Menu Planning' project for this week. I made my first week's plan and am really enjoying already knowing what we're having for each meal every day. I hope this is something I can stick with long term!
So, to sum up, so far from the book I've done:
1) Get up early (more on this later - I'm finally getting up before the kids - long before :) )
2) Daily To Do list
3) Create a chore system
4) Menu planning
I'm kind of cheating early on, since these are mostly things I have done in the past or was already planning on doing, but they're also important 'systems' (a word I liked from the Do It Tomorrow book) that will help the household run more smoothly. Just imagine if I could consistently do all of the systems at once - I would be so much more efficient! :)
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