Hi Honeys,
Welcome to day eight of Blogtober. Day eight already! Time is passing too fast and it feels as if it's whooshing past without me too. Very odd, but then everything's been odd this past 18 months or so hasn't it?
For quite some time now, Hubby and I have been trying to live a little healthier, recycle a little more (and we already did it like it was our job 😊) to be a little more mindful of what we buy and to definitely waste less 😊
One of the best tools that helps us to do this is our weekly menu board where we plan our dinners for the week ahead before our weekly shop...
We started out by using a notepad, then I made my own little menu board by making a brightly coloured sheet that I placed inside an A4 (very usefully the same size as the printable) glass frame. we then used an erasable marker, made to be used on a whiteboard, to jot down details of that weeks meals, wiping the glass clean the following week and planning the following week.
We've moved on to a wooden chalk board we got from Home Bargains I think (it was a wee while ago honeys I'm sorry.)
The board sits at the bottom of our stairs on a picture ledge, all ready to be grabbed, completed and used to write out what we need (after checking what's still in the pantry cupboard, fridge and freezer) in our weekly shop.
We definitely do buy less than we used to (and given I lost my job this year, that's been a blessing) but there is something wonderful that happens when you can see at a glance what's for dinner that evening. It's simply one less thing to stress or worry about and lets me take whatever is needed, if anything, out of the freezer in the morning to allow it time to defrost.
It's given us some much needed order honeys. 😊 We decide together what we'll have and plan our menus and guess what honeys, it's fun 😊 That being said, everything we do together is fun, I was blessed honeys to marry my best pal and even after all these years (over thirty - where did that time go 😊) he still is.💗
When I started using a menu
board I immediately noticed that I was wasting less food. I could plan to use
any leftovers by using them as a basis for next night's meal, so it's
saving money too.
Something else I've noticed is that planning ahead has allowed me to ditch
processed foods almost entirely. It's a very, very rare occurrence
that a tin is opened around here and if a meal is taken from the freezer it
won't be a "ready meal" it'll be one of my "made ahead and
frozen for later" dinners 😋
For example,this Sunday we're having lasagne, Hubby's favourite, we cooked them together last weekend. We actually made four lasagnes. Two "dinner size" ones for Sunday dinner last week and this week, and two smaller individual ones, which Hubby took to work with him for lunch - last Monday and will do the same this Monday too. I told you he adores lasagne 😊
We do tend to batch cook often recently. By doing this we're saving on energy (only using the oven once to cook two weeks worth of lasagnes) and making dinner the follwing Sunday because so much easier because we have the main component of it, a lovely home made lasagne, just waiting to be taken out of the freezer.
Just a tiny amount of organisation completely changed how we cook, how we
eat and has been saving us money too.
If you'd like to use them, I have two dinner menu printables you could download. They look like this honeys...
The pale blue background menu can be found here
The dinner menu with lots of pastels can be found here
To print them honeys, go into your printers options
and choose to print in portrait and center the image vertically. Some
printers you'll be able to "print to fit" the A4 paper, but if you
print at 100% of the image size it will look like this:
If you'd like to use them more than once (and I'd love it if you did honeys) just do as I did, either place the menu inside a frame with glass, write on the glass with an erasable marker and then wipe off as needed. Or you could do the same thing using a poly pocket too. I hope you like them honeys x
Do you use a menu planner honeys? Are you taking part in Blogtober this year? If so, please leave your link below and I'll drop by and say hello x
Till next time dear ones, hugs always xx
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