I didn’t think I needed a meal planning board, even though I’m a planner. You know the kind. The Type A personality that loves to make lists and cross things off them. Yup, that’s me. But…
whenever I would see someone with a menu board in their home displaying each meal for the week ahead I thought it was silly.
“Who needs that?” i’d think.
Turns out, I did!
I was notorious for forgetting to take something out of the freezer for dinner until it was too late. As a result, each meal would be haphazardly thrown together, they’d be late {my kids are sticklers for eating dinner at 5 pm or else they get “hangry”}, or we’d eat out more than we wanted.
In an effort to better organize my house in 2020 {last year’s resolution} I decided to repaint the inside of my pantry door and turn it into a meal board. Impatient me however couldn’t wait to complete the project and bought a dry erase board with a magnet for $1. Then I stumbled across a fancier one a few weeks later at the grocery store.
In the few months that it has been hanging on our fridge, I have learned there are a few big benefits to this simple meal board purchase.
Benefits:
- My husband isn’t constantly asking what meal is for dinner. It’s there for everyone to see. Plus, if he wants something special for dinner he writes it on the board, and makes it.
- I shop better. Having the meal planning board helps me plan out the ingredients I’ll need for our meals for the week. No more quick trips to the grocery store because I’m missing one main ingredient for tonight’s meal.
- We eat out less. This also may have something to do with the ongoing pandemic but I feel by writing down our menu for the week forces us to look at how many times we are eating out as a family and how much we are spending on it. Don’t worry, I still try to write “Takeout Night” on the board at least once a week to help support local businesses during this tough time.
- It forces me to use frozen foods from our freezer. Who else here is guilty of buying food and then forgetting about it in your freezer? I would do it all the time. Now, when I go to write out our meal board for the week I take a look through my freezer to see what we have and what we can make from it.
- It’s fun. Having the board helps me get out of the funk of cooking the same meal over and over again. Plus I like trying to get creative with the meal board especially when we near a holiday. Prior to Halloween this year we had “Ghost Shaped Pancakes”, “Spoo-ghetti”, and “Mummy Dogs”.
How do you organize your weekly meals? Do you have a meal planning board?
