Ok, so you have your list of meals (from Part 1), now what?? In this post I will tell you how I took my lists of meals and turned them into a "menu rotation", as I like to refer to it.
You will need to get your list of meals and all of your recipes in hand to complete this. The next step is assigning the meals into a spot in the rotation. The first time I made my rotation, I just went down my list and put two meals per week (again you may be cooking more than twice a week). Since then, I have made several adjustments to my rotation and have learned a few pointers that could save you time. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when assigning meals to the rotation:
- Group Meals with "Like" Ingredients - When assigning meals into the rotation, group meals with like ingredients in the same week. I cannot tell you the number of times I have had food spoil because I wasn't able to use all of it. But if you are planning meals with like-ingredients, this is less likely to happen. For instance, if you have two recipes, and one calls for 1 cup of sour cream and another calls for 1/2 cup sour cream, you can pair these two recipes together in one week. You can buy one tub of sour cream to save money and keep from spoiling the sour cream.
- Group Meals by the Number of Ingredients - The second thing I have learned is to group recipes by the number of ingredients. If you are trying to save money at the grocery store, you want to be sure to buy less each shopping trip. Right? One way of saving money each shopping trip is by not having recipes with a lot of ingredients in the same week. Try grouping a recipe with many ingredients with a recipe that doesn't call for a lot of ingredients as opposed to two recipes with numerous ingredients in one week. As mentioned in Part 1, I do try to avoid recipes with a lot of ingredients, but let's face it, some of them are just too irresistable.
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| Week 15 of my Menu Rotation |
Once you have your meals organized and assigned into weeks, you will need your recipes. In the picture above, you should be able to see I have listed my ingredients for each of the meals I have planned. This makes planning my shopping trip a whole lot easier, because I do not have to flip through my recipes to find what I need to put on my list. While I am listing my ingredients, I go ahead and put the amount that I need to make planning even more easier.
Some of you may be looking at my menu rotation and wondering what do we do on the weekends. I found out on the weekends, that either, (1) we had food left over from the week that we needed to eat or it would spoil, (2) we wanted to eat out, or (3) we do something spontaneous and head out of town. So, for the weekends, I typically keep ingredients on hand needed for quick meals, such as, sandwiches. Planning for the weekends may help you to be even more organized. If so, plan meals to cook on the weekends and add these to your rotation as well!
I constructed this table in Microsoft Word and started typing my menus in. I developed 15 weeks of meals. Ideally, I rotate these meals around every 15 weeks. However, things do come up. There are weeks that my husband and I realize that our freezer is overflowing and we need to eat what we have in the freezer. Or, we have someone visiting and I would prefer to cook a "more-impressive" meal (wink, wink). The majority of the time, I use my menu rotation as planned.
These menus have cut out a huge amount of chaos from running my household. I pray that it helps lighten your load as well and you enjoy providing delicious food for the blessings God has given you!
"She also rises while it is yet night, And provides food for her household..." Proverbs 31:15
If you have a question about anything that I have written, feel free to leave a comment! I will be happy to answer!
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