So, step two in my meal planning is monthly meal tracking. After the month is over, I transfer all our my weekly meal plans onto a month calendar.
I started doing this about 4 months ago and I’m already questioning why I hadn’t started this earlier. There have been multiple times that I’ll flip back to previous months to see what we’ve had for dinner if I need to fill a slot on my weekly plan. It’s also a tool I use for keeping track of, and rating, any new recipes I may try.
It’s also kind of a fun way to look back and notice any patterns in our eating habits. For example, based on previous months, we eat turkey burgers, spaghetti or lasagna and roast chicken at least once a month.
Anyway, since making my weekly To Do/To Make/To Buy printable, I wanted something a little bit nicer (and more coordinated) than my current system of drawing crazy non-straight lines on a piece of notebook paper. Seriously…I can’t handle the crooked lines. It also wasted a lot of space…I don’t need an entire page for one month because I only keep track of dinners. So I created my sheet with 2 months on one page. {and people say I’m not green. Ha!}
Since my first printable seemed to be a hit, I wanted to share this one with you as well…
Download it: Monthly Meal Tracking Calendar
Download it – print it – use it – share it – do your thing
And I think it’s generic enough that you could use it for things other than meal planning as well.
I have been trying to be better about meal planning for my family. How many meals do plan for each week? How do you choose what meals to plan for? How often do you try out new recipes? Sorry for the bombardment of questions.
I typically meal plan for 7 nights a week…granted, those 7 nights do always go as planned so I've always got back-up options, just in case. I meal plan solely for dinners…I start by looking at the upcoming week, seeing what's already on the calendar, what nights my husband will potentially be home late, etc. I go through phases of trying new recipes…the week before last I tried 2 new recipes. Last week, no new recipes. This week, another 3 new ones. Then there's times I go weeks & weeks without trying anything new.
Just getting into it, I'd say start slow…maybe 3 dinners? See how it goes. Once you find your groove, it's easy to add more in.
I hope that answers your questions. Feel free to ask any questions along the way!! :)
Thanks. That does help. I'd love to see some of your montly meal calendars that you've already completed.
Also, thanks for the printable, I am going to start filling it out for us for the month in the hopes it'll help me with my meal planning.
I'll put together some months for you. Did you see my weekly printable that I posted last week? That's what I use on a weekly basis…the link is up in this post. Also, thought I'd share some meal planning posts I wrote over on Liberating Working Moms… http://liberatingworkingmoms.com/2012/04/05/worki… http://liberatingworkingmoms.com/2012/04/18/when-… http://liberatingworkingmoms.com/2012/05/05/worki… http://liberatingworkingmoms.com/2012/09/19/worki…
Hopefully this is helpful! :)
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I often try new recipes