Feature Friday is an occasional highlight of something that works in my home/ life.

I love menu planning.

It saves me such a lot of time and helps us all to eat healthier and shop better for groceries.

Here is my favourite little magnetic menu planning board (South Africans, I got it for R30 at Mega Mica about 3 years ago and it’s not actually intended for menu planning – I think it’s for kids’ homework).

I start off by cleaning the whole thing.

I then check my freezer and see if there’s anything I want to use up or if there are freezer meals that need eating.

Add those to the board.

Then I make sure we don’t eat any one carb two nights in a row (I like to switch things every night).

I only plan for Mon – Fri and on Saturdays and Sundays we fly by the seat of our pants.

Not really, I just felt like saying that.

We usually use up any leftovers or I’ll do the quickest thing which is a pasta.

Notice our meals are on top and the babies’ meals are on the bottom of the squares.

The babies eat what we had for supper the previous night since they eat at 5 pm and I’m not even home from work then. Except when we have spicy meals like curries.

And that’s it.

Easy-peasy menu planning.

I don’t consult a lot of recipe books except when I’m uninspired which is fairly rare because I do love food.

I have set myself a little goal this year though; I’m to try two new meals every month. Of course, all these new things are always cooked on the weekends which is the only time I have more than 30 minutes to spend in the kitchen.

Do you menu plan?

Do you cook the same things or do you like trying new recipes?

P.S. Are you joining me for Spring into Organising?

Colleen from Florida wrote…

I love the idea of menu planning but have no organization for recipes.

How do you organize your recipes?

I have them electronically, paper, and websites.

Thank you!

Colleen, I love this question.

I used to be one of those people who drooled at reading recipes. I’d have every intention of cooking or baking the delicious _________ and then life would happen.

I wrote a post on organising my recipes about 18 months ago – not much has changed but here is the summary

1. I’ve learned to be brutally honest with myself and only print recipes I know I will actually cook. That one step will save you tons of cooking angst and lots of paper
2. Once the recipe passes the taste and easy-to-make test (I don’t believe in doing any dish that takes longer than 30 minutes to prepare) and I know I’ll do it again, I put it in one of my recipe flipfiles. I currently have one for main courses, desserts, muffins (hey, I love baking muffins). Here’s what I do with small recipes when I don’t want to waste a whole page for just one.
3. I also have a flipfile for new recipes I want to try.
4. We have a list of about 24 meals that we both like (things like cauliflower I have to eat elsewhere ) and I do my weekly menu plan based on these meals.
5. Only when I feel bored cooking the same things, then do I go looking through that flipfile to try out my new recipes. Of course, some are so compelling you just have to cook them straight away

So in summary, I’d say

• be realistic about your time and money constraints (we all know some recipes where you’d have to go SEARCHING in exotic places for the ingredients; those are not my types of recipes!)
• categorise well (according to how YOU think and live)
• declutter regularly

What are your best recipe-organising tips?