Recipe Management

If you are anything like me, you have more cookbooks, recipe cards from friends, scrap pieces of paper with recipes scribbled on them, cutout recipes from magazines and maybe even your inbox has a folder labeled recipes (okay, maybe that is just me!) With all good intentions, you are striving to give your family new and exciting things to eat, some variety and somehow renew your interest in cooking by doing some adventurous recipes. But with all of this well intended trying, you are drowning in your meal planning... always struggling to have food in the pantry that amounts to a well balanced meal, running by the grocery store everyday (my biggest pet peeve!) and in a moment of desperation... just order pizza, AGAIN!


Never fear.... help is here!!! No matter your style of cooking, southern, Mexican, prepared foods, cooking from scratch.... you can have a system that works for your family. My best secret is to simplify, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY!

1. Simplify your planning to the 10 meals your family likes best. For my family this would include meals like chicken and dumplings, chicken pot pie, sloppy joes, spaghetti, shepherds pie, grilled pork chops, roast with vegetables, cooked ham with sides, cubed steak with mashed potatoes, chicken parmesan, beef vegetable soup.


2. Important tips for choosing your meals: Tip #1: Your crock pot is your very best friend! Buy one, love one, use one weekly! Plan at least 1/3 of your meals to utilize your crock pot in some way. Once you take the time to learn how to use it, your cooking time will go much faster. From the list of meals I mentioned above, the following will work with a crock pot - chicken and dumplings, beginnings of chicken pot pie, sloppy joes, spaghetti, roast, ham, chicken parmesan and beef vegetable soup. As you can see, I love my crock pots! Yes, that was plural, I have 3! Tip #2: Always plan your meals so that you can cook once and make two meals. Example: Yesterday I was making chicken and dumplings, so I loaded up 2 crock pots with whole cut up fryer chickens, seasonings, and let them cook all day long. In the afternoon, I de-boned all the chicken and saved half of it for chicken pot pie later the next week (just freeze it). I also saved the chicken broth from one of the crock pots to go in a soup the next week. I used the other half of my chicken and broth to finish up my chicken and dumplings right there in the crock pot, or you could do it on the stove. See, I cooked once and will already have 2 other meals started for later. The same is true for sloppy joes, spaghetti and shepherds pie. I will brown all of my ground beef at one time, and usually make sloppy joes (from scratch) and spaghetti (from scratch) all on the same day. Those two meals can be put in the crock pot to simmer all day and put up the leftover in the freezer for the next week.


3. Cook the same set of meals every two weeks. Depending on how many nights a week you cook (maybe your church has dinner Wednesday night, or you always eat out on Sunday), choose enough meals to last you 2 weeks, then repeat these meals every two weeks. Yes, that might sound boring. Yet in reality, you are only eating the same thing twice a month. You probably already do that with a few meals anyway.


4. Save your shopping list. Once I have my 10 meals, I enter the ingredients I will need for those meals in my shopping list program and save the list. (www.homeplansoftware.com/shoplist.htm). This way, I will know how much money I am spending on my meals, plus I will already have a pre-made list of common ingredients for these meals.


5. Variety is the spice of life. I usually try to incorporate 1-2 new meals each month into my regular set of 10. If my family absolutely loves one of the new meals, then I will exchange one on the list for the new recipe. Otherwise, my meal planning stays pretty consistent and simple, once my system is in place.

Today, I talked mostly about the main course. In the next post, I'll give you some of my recipes and talk a little about how to put together a well balanced meal. I truly hope you are enjoying these post. Please leave me some feed back if you are enjoying the post or if I can explain something in a better way. You do not need to have an account to leave a comment. Just choose anonymous and when you finish typing, write your name at the bottom of your comment.

Bon Jour!