1. Moving into our new house; 2. Organizing our stuff; 3. Painting our new house. (Especially now that part is over!)
4. Snow days; 5. Cuddling with Emma; 6. Cuddling by the fireplace in our new house.
Obviously, I like overhead shots of food these days. 7. Pulled Pork; 8. Brown Butter (on my birthday!); 9. Pretty Egg Yolks; 10. Mushrooms.
You might already know how I feel about leftovers. The older I get, the more I like them. Some things, yes, I’m OK with reheating two or three days later.
Other things – like this spinach queso – I could not wait until the next day to have another bite! So what do I make? Nothing other than a quesadilla! The night before (when I made the queso), we also had shrimp enchiladas, guacamole, chips & salsa and margaritas. I told you that I was missing our favorite Mexican restaurant!!
Last week as I was planning our meals for this week, I asked a quick question on my Facebook page about meal planning – do you do it? do you like it? what are your repeat meals? I quickly learned that a lot of people either want to plan meals and they don’t know how, they’ve tried it before and it doesn’t work for them, or it’s their favorite part of the week. While I fall into the latter one, I found out that a lot of you fall into the first two.
The first comment that I received after posting the question was this: “Share your secrets, I have not conquered how to do this yet!”
And that got me to thinking that I really should share because there really is no secret! There are a lot of great posts out there about meal planning but I think that it will look a little bit different for you than it will for me than it will for the next person.
So, here’s where we will start, with a quiz.
If you only shop for groceries once monthly, planning your meals will probably be a little more time intensive, but will only need to be done once per month. If you shop every week (like I do), you will just need to spend a little time each week to make your plan and make your list.
Here is why I plan out our meals: when Paul and I first got married (I was already blogging) I would do the grocery shopping, but with no direction in mind. I would buy tons of stuff that we didn’t really need and nothing that we really did need. OK, not nothing. But a lot of what I would buy would go to waste or would end up needing to be frozen before it went bad. I can’t stand wasted food.
So I started playing around with meal planning and it was a definite work in progress for a while. But once I got the hang of it, it became second nature and now I actually love planning our meals.
The type-A personality in me loves it because it’s an excuse to use another spreadsheet. The budgeter in me loves it because I don’t (usually!) buy things that are not on my list – an occasional impulse buy is sure to happen though! The planner in me LOVES not having to stand in front of the fridge every day and wonder what we are having for dinner – it’s already been decided and (most-likely) we have all of the ingredients we’ll need to make it.
Are you convinced yet?
Most of you know that we recently moved away from Kansas City. If you have ever moved away from a city where you had lived for a significant amount of time, you will be able to relate to this statement:
I miss our favorite restaurants!!!
Particularly, our favorite Mexican restaurant. Most of you also know that Mexican ranks in the top three of my favorites and not just any Mexican food, but particularly the spinach queso, commonly referred to as espinaca at our favorite place in KC.
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Bake Your Day, LLC by Cassie Laemmli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
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