This Tools Section is a work in progress. I’m planning on creating a variety of tools such as scheduling, meal planning, budgeting, activities & crafts for the children etc. Basically it will have all of the tools that I use regularly to keep me sane!
It doesn’t matter what job or type of work a person does, there are tools available to make it easier. These are the tools that I’ve developed to make my job as a work at home mom easier. I’m offering all of these tools FREE for you to use, I hope they help you.
If you have any comments or suggestions please feel leave a comment or complete the contact form on the ‘Contact Me’ page.
Menu Planning Tools
After being asked to share my monthly meal plan, grocery list and recipes I decided to put them on my website to share with anyone who is interested. I know it saves me time and money and I hope it does you too. There are a couple of things that I want to explain before you start using the menu planning tools. So keep reading and I’ll explain about my monthly grocery shopping trip, monthly meal plan and recipes.
Monthly Grocery Shopping
I started doing my grocery shopping once a month and found that I saved approximately $200.00 per month. I still pick up essentials throughout the month such as milk or if we run out of T.P. but I usually stick to those essentials. The only other time I will pick up groceries is if there is a fabulous sale on items that I use regularly, but that is usually pretty rare.
There are a couple of reasons why I changed from shopping weekly to once a month. The first reason being, that our local grocer offers 10% off the entire grocery order on the first Wednesday of the month. So with coupons, sale items and the extra 10% off it turns into quite a substantial savings. The other reason is that if I was going to take the time to plan a grocery trip, I may as well take a little more time and plan it for the month, which will save some time on a weekly basis – and who couldn’t use a little time saving here and there? My weekly shopping trips used to take me about two to three hours (not to mention the 20 minutes of driving each way to town) , including planning, which works out to about 8 hours a month. My monthly shopping trips take about 3 hours including planning. So I’m saving 5 hours a month! And lastly, I hate grocery shopping so if I only have to do it once a month – that’s great!
So to sum it up my monthly shopping trip saves me money (yeah!), saves me time (yeah!), saves me a headache! (yeah!) Because I only do it once a month, my husband is more willing to look after the kids so I can go grocery shopping.
When I tell people that I only shop once a month they get quite concerned – what about fresh fruits and vegetables? Well in the summer the fresh vegetables is never an issue as we just get what we need from the garden, however that is only a few short months in the year. The rest of the year I plan my meals accordingly, meaning that I use the fresh items first and then use frozen or canned. Vegetables can keep quite a while in the fridge, especially carrots and onion. Lettuce is usually the first to go but even then it usually lasts until about the middle of the month. The celery and peppers usually lasts until the end of the third week. If I find that I still have some vegetables that are close to getting old then I will freeze them.
As for fruit, I normally buy bananas, strawberries, grapes, apples and oranges. That is the order in which they normally go bad as well. So the bananas and strawberries get ate first (or frozen if the kids get tired of eating them), then the grapes get eaten during the 2nd and 3rd weeks. We eat the apples and oranges last. This way the kids don’t get tired of eating apples and oranges because they only usually eat them for the last 2 weeks of a month.
The monthly grocery shopping list will be a work in progress – I have some ideas on how I want it to work but have not had the time to work on that just yet. So for now I just have a list of the ingredients that you will need each week.
Menu Planning
I’ve been doing the monthly grocery shopping for a year and I really like it. However I was missing one aspect. Until recently I was still doing my meal planning on a daily basis – depending on what was available and what I felt like cooking – which most of the time turned out to be something with ground beef in it because I hadn’t taken anything out to thaw. I have started doing a monthly meal plan and I love it. Some people do a weekly meal plan and some do a monthly meal plan. I choose to do a monthly meal plan being as I already shop for groceries once a month, a monthly meal plan makes sense.
You may notice that I do my monthly meal planning from the first Thursday of a month to the following Wednesday of the following month. This is because I shop for groceries on the first Wednesday evening of every month.
You can change any of the meals around to suit your needs. For example if you know that you will only have a certain amount of time to prepare a meal, you can change the meals around. I suggest that you compare your meal plan with your monthly schedule to make sure that the meals are going to work on each of the days – if they don’t work, change them.
Lastly, on the meal planning calendar you will notice that I have not included a salad or vegetables and only sometimes include the ‘starch’. I will include the starch (potatoes, rice or noodles) only if it goes with the recipe. As for the vegetables and salad or soup – I’ll leave this up to you. I typically will have a salad with supper one night and fresh cut up vegetables with dip the next night.
Recipes
I will warn you, I’m not a connoisseur, culinary or a chef and I definitely do not have any ‘kitchen’ training other than what I do day to day. My family and I are not passionate about food like some people are, so don’t expect gourmet recipes. These recipes are a collection that I use on a regular basis. Some of the recipes came from my Mother-in-law, others are ones that I made up or were given to me by others.
One other thing – I don’t follow recipes. I use them as a very general guideline. So all of the recipes that I made up or that are in my head will not have accurate measurements. Feel free to play around with any of the recipes to make them suit your needs.
Again, this area will be a continuous work in progress. Currently my cookbook is a mess but I’m hoping to rectify that as I work on this area of the website.
I hope you enjoy the tools section of this website! If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know. The comment section is always open as well as the ‘Contact Me‘.
Enjoy!
