Welcome to day 3 of our Make-A-Menu Series with Menu Maker Mom. Leslie is going to take you through her Menu planning process one small step at a time!
It’s time to get out our binders again and continue creating our super-organized system for making menus. Now that you have your menu-making skills well under way, it’s time to make this system ROCK AND ROLL! You are going to make your cooking almost effortless and save loads of cash as you do it!
With this part of the Make-A-Menu system, we’re going to focus on using loss leaders to create our first menu. Loss leaders are the items that the grocery store reduces each week hoping that you’ll stop by to purchase and, of course, pick up a few impulse items here and there while you’re shopping! But as we all know, we’re not going to do that because we’ll have planned our shopping trip according to the exact items necessary to cook the meals on our menu!
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STEP #1- Gather your supplies
Here are a list of supplies to start the next project in your menu-making repertoire: Your Make-A-Menu Binder
Dividers
A hole punch
Notebook paper
Your favorite store’s sales flyer
A blank grocery list form, or paper for making a grocery list
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STEP #2 – Set up the Make-A-Menu Binder
After you gather your supplies, it’s time to get the notebook set up.
Here are the labels for your dividers:
My menus
My family’s favorites
Chicken
Beef
Pork
Fish
Desserts
Breads
Appetizers
Untried recipes
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Step #3 – Make-A-Menu!!!!
Pull out your favorite grocery store’s sales flyer. What kind of main ingredients are on sale this week? For example, is there an awesome deal on chicken, hamburger meat, or pork chops? Choose one main ingredient that is on sale to focus on and then pull out your Family Favorites List. Choose 5 recipes from your Family Faves using that main ingredient. Using printer paper or notebook paper, get each recipe on paper by writing it out, printing it, or scanning it.
Jot down the ingredients on your grocery list. When you are done, put each recipe behind the appropriate tab in your notebook.
After you finish using the grocery store sales flyer and Family Favorite List, put them into your new notebook. You can put the flyer in the front pocket so you can refer to it later in the week, if necessary.
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Step #4 – Fill out your Menu Calendar
Write the 5 recipes on your Menu Calendar, and put the calendar in a prominent place that everyone can see!
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Step #5 – Get menu ingredients prepped ahead of time.
After you shop for the ingredients, it’s time to do a little prep work if at all possible. Making sure that the main ingredients are prepped and packaged in a convenient manner is crucial to staying out of the fast food lane on a busy night!
To start, meat should be sealed in single-cooking-session packages. To do a little more, do some extra prep work such as cooking up the ground beef and packaging it in 2-cup bags, boiling and chopping chicken, marinating a bag of “dump” chicken, or making up a batch of meatballs, for example.
Stay tuned as we finish this series on Monday with “Week 4: Creating the Make-A-Menu Box”! Follow me on Pinterest, Facebook and subscribe to my FREE newsletter! This post may contain affiliate links.
