April Meal Planning Update

It's about time for a meal planning/budget update don't you think?

I haven't been as strictly following my guidelines as I should, but things have still been going well. We've had food to eat and we haven't been over budget. We have gotten food out more than we should though and it probably hasn't been coming out of the grocery budget every time like it is supposed to.

One issue that I kept facing with meal planning is keeping track of what meals I was planning. I know that sounds silly, most people would make a list that is their "meal plan." I normally take a quicker route by choosing recipes and just going straight to making a grocery list with the ingredients. On my grocery list I will write where the recipe is from, like a book and a page number, or website, or what-have-you. This wasn't the best way to do it as I would often be missing the list by the time I was home from the store (mostly due to having a nearly 2 year old in the cart who wanted to hold it).


I finally came up with the best solution to this problem while still not taking up much additional time. I now have a folder in the "bookmarks toolbar" of my browser called "weekly recipes." Now I put all of the recipes associated with my grocery list in this folder. That being said, it does only work for recipes I can find online, but oftentimes I can find the same recipes that I have in a magazine or book online. When I can't, I just dogear the page and try not to forget. It's been working out pretty well so far. I know I could do it other ways that would work better, like by charting an actual meal plan page, but I like taking this quicker, easy way out. I would like to get back into the habit of writing my meals for the week on my pantry door chalkboard though. That always suffers the risk of being erased by a child though. Hashtag momlife, am I right?

How is your meal planning/budgeting going?