It’s 5 o’clock—do you know where your dinner is? Judging by the crowds in the supermarket, many families do not! Adopting time-saving routines for menu planning, grocery shopping, and food storage can save hours of time, hundreds of dollars, and an ocean of end-of-day stress.
Menu- and Meal-Planning Basics
Say the words “menu plan,” and objections pop up all over. “It takes too much time!” “How do I know what we’re going to want to eat three days from now?” “I like to see what’s fresh at the store each day.” Often the idea of making a simple list of meals to be served in the household over the next week seems daunting, so you put it off. The result is four days of drive-thru dinners that pump up the blood pressure or time-consuming daily trips to the supermarket.
Compared to joining the after-work lines at the grocery store, making a menu plan is a walk in the park. Start small with a weekly dinner plan. Grab your calendar and a sheet of paper, or print a free weekly menu planner from OrganizedHome.com. Look over the week ahead and make a quick list of what the household will eat each night for dinner. List entrée, side dishes, drinks, and dessert for each day’s evening meal, and you’re done!
Keep your calendar in mind as you plan. An evening spent shuttling the soccer team is no time to try a complicated new recipe, so save recreational cooking for free weekend evenings. Match quick-fix entrées to busy nights, or put the slow cooker into play to have dinner waiting when you arrive home from the soccer field.
Your next step is to check your pantry. Start a shopping list, noting any items you’ll need to buy to prepare the meals on your menu plan. Scanning the food ads in the newspaper or online, plan shopping trips to take advantage of sales.
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SPEEDY SOLUTION |
For the fastest menu plan, use a monthly calendar and packet of small sticky notes. Write dinner menus on the sticky notes and paste them to the relevant date. Need to rearrange meals? Swap the sticky notes. Next week, repost favorite meals and stow the extra notes on the back of the calendar for later use.
Finally, post your menu plan publicly. Each morning, check the list. Will you need to remove items from the freezer or start the slow cooker before you leave? Get the jump on dinner in the morning to cut stress at the end of the day.
After you’ve made weekly menu plans for a few weeks, you’ll see some themes begin to appear in your planning. You’ll notice that supermarket sales appear in regular rotation, and that the family’s week-by-week activities have a predictable rhythm. Take advantage of these menu-planning cycles to save time and money.
For example, supermarket specials operate on regular six- to eight-week sale cycles. Knowing that boneless chicken breasts will be offered at a good price about every six weeks helps you make a menu plan that takes advantage of this savings cycle. Grilled chicken, chicken enchiladas, and a hearty chicken soup could all make the menu that week.
As another example, you may notice that certain weeks each month have a faster—or slower—pace of activities. Busy weeks, with extra evening meetings or sports practices, will call for quick-fix dinner plans; more relaxed weeks signal the time to plan more elaborate dinners. Recycling menu plans to meet these cyclical challenges simplifies shopping and cooking chores.
Once you’ve conquered the dinner hour, consider expanding menu-planning efforts. A rotating weekly breakfast plan standardizes the shopping list as well and fights the daily cold cereal habit. Expanding menu planning from a week to a month at a time taps the savings offered by bulk buying at the supermarket or warehouse clubs.
Shopping Tips
When you step into your local market, you’re entering a battleground for your time and money. Savvy retailers know that grocery spending increases the longer you’re in the store, so they’ve designed store layouts to delay you as long as possible. The added distractions of on-site bakeries and coffee shops, end-of-aisle displays, and confusing multiple pricing options make it easy to lose track of time and your budget while shopping.
Save your valuable time and money by fighting back with these tips for speedy, efficient shopping:
1. Use a shopping list. Waiting to decide what you need until you’re at the store makes you an easy target for budget-busting impulse buys. Make a shopping list from the comfort of home, and don’t deviate from it. No list entry, no dice—and no DVDs, candy bars, or cut flowers, either.
2. Shop alone. Family members of all ages bring built-in distractions and their own agendas to the process of shopping. When you can, fly solo. You’ll escape from the premises faster and cheaper.
3. Shop less often. Quick trips to the supermarket are outsized time wasters. Use a shopping list and a menu plan to get in there once, get what you need, and get out the door…and stay out!
Keeping Order in the Pantry
You’ve planned your meals and shopped for them efficiently, so don’t quit now! The next step to kitchen efficiency is to store food properly to preserve freshness and flavor. Try these simple steps to manage pantry and food storage:
• Wash and store produce directly after you buy it.
• Repackage meat or poultry into meal-size portions.
• Store perishable items in the coldest spots in the refrigerator.
• Rotate pantry products, adding new items to the back of the shelf.
• Seal open packages of rice or pasta with zipper-lock food-storage bags.
• Label and date frozen foods, and package them to prevent freezer burn.
• Check stored vegetables regularly for sprouting or decay.
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ROAD HAZARD |
Television programs devoted to “extreme couponing” are fun to watch, but be careful! Too often, forays into couponing lead to cluttered pantries and food waste. Limit coupon use to products your household actually uses, and in quantities that make sure you’ll use them up. A bargain’s no bargain if it just gets thrown away.