Month: August 2016

Menu Monday 🍽

Meal planning can be a daunting task, especially if you’re new at it. I’m by no means an expert in it, but I do know what works for me. Here are some of my tips for meal planning.

  1. Shop your pantry first. See what you already have on hand to plan meals with. Plan what you can with it, and then start filling in the gaps.
  2. Pinterest is your friend. If you haven’t already, sign up for Pinterest. There are so many recipes to choose from you could probably go the whole year and never repeat a recipe.
  3. Choose recipes with foods and ingredients you already use and keep on hand. Not only does this reduce the stress of meal planning, it’s money saving too. The more new ingredients you need to buy, the higher your grocery bill will be. Keep it limited to the things you already use. Though I admit, I do like trying new things, so I’ll look for recipes that have only 1 or 2 ingredients I don’t normally use. Sometimes I like the new ingredients enough to make it/them a regular.
  4. Keep a binder with your favorite recipes.  Keep your favorite recipes in a binder and before long, meal planning will be as simple as choosing what recipes you want to use.
  5. Don’t stress! If it’s too overwhelming to plan 1 month at time for you, do 1 or 2 weeks instead and work up from there. Or maybe you only have the time to plan 1 or 2 weeks. Great! Don’t stress over it. Meal planning is so helpful, but not if it causes you stress.

I’m always looking for new ways to improve my meal planning. If you have a tip, I’d love to see it. Leave a comment for me below.

💰 Frugal Friday – Homeschooling

Though we use a charter school and have many resources offered for our use, there are still some things that aren’t quite what I’m looking for or wanting to use. That’s when I take to the internet in search of what I need. Here are a couple of my favorite free websites I use.

1. Handwriting Pages – I can make my own and customize it to what I need. It has cursive, print, D’Nealian style.

http://handwritingpractice.net/handwriting/index.html

2. Draw, Right, Now Printables – I discovered the books through our school last year and my son loved them. Good for Science, History, Art, and Writing, this website offers free printable pages to use along with books.

http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/DrawWriteNowPrintables.html