Magnetic Menu Planning

I love to cook. I don't even mind cooking dinners night after night for my family. What I don't like is trying to think of what to cook. I always seem to draw a blank or can only think of the meals which I have cooked over the past couple of nights. I used to be great at menu planning (I would plan my meals for a month at a time) but these days, I just never seem to have the time to sit still long enough to menu plan. And so I went in search of a solution ....

I tried to plan my meals just one week at a time and decorated a gorgeous menu board for my kitchen where I could write the meals onto the glass. Simple, easy to change, should have worked a treat ... but it didn't. I often found myself trying to quickly plan my menu before I went grocery shopping and I struggled to think of dinners to cook.

Enter Pinterest (source of many fabulous ideas) and I saw a Magnetic Menu Planner. Now this was just the solution I had been looking for. The idea was to make up magnets of all the meals you like to cook and then just arrange them on your fridge into a meal plan. Perfect. So here is my interpretation ...

If you are at a loss as to what to include at this point, ask your family for their favourites or for meals you haven't cooked in a while. The other thing you could try is just to keep a record of what you cook over the next couple of weeks and use this as your base. I did both of the above and then made sure I added a magnet for Eating Out, MamaBake Meals (I will tell you all about these another day), Freezer Meals (I often cook in bulk), Try A New Recipe and Take Away.

I designed my magnets using Story Book Creator Plus which is a fabulous digital scrapbooking program from Creative Memories. I use it for lots of projects around the house. Then I printed them on cardstock, laminated the little cards and then placed self-adhesive magnets on the back. You could do something similar with post-it notes if you don't want to go all out with the magnets.

This is what the finished product looks like. I can now easily plan 3 weeks worth of menus in a matter of minutes. It is easy to move meals around and to add new meals.

Many thanks to the lovely Sarah for making me the weekly grid to place my magnets onto and for lending me her laminator today when mine started smoking!!! True - one of the little cards went in and didn't come out. And to Jill from www.controllingmychaos.com for the original idea. I love it.