Bored of meal planning? Make a meal planning board!

October 19, 2010

Bored of meal planning? Make a meal planning board!

-By Lisa

I know I need to meal plan. I know it saves:

money
trips to the store
the life of my poor neglected produce
the stress that hits at 5pm when I realize there is still one more meal in the day
the annoyance of eating peanut butter on Wasa crackers for dinner because it’s all we have in the house

O.K. I get it. I need to meal plan. But though I find food itself to be wonderful and interesting, planning out dinner for the whole week can feel like a drag.

Here is my latest little DIY project that will hopefully invigorate my meal planning and cost me exactly zero dollars.

I started with a system of scribbling the weekly meal plan on a scrap of paper and then promptly losing it. But since that was not really working for me, I decided I needed some sort of list device to keep myself organized. I find white boards to be hideously fugly, so that was not going to be displayed in my kitchen.

Then I stumbled upon this ingenious idea - it’s a menu board made out of a regular old photo frame. I simply dug around in our basement until I found this old mat-less frame that I liked. I made up and printed out a simple menu sheet that just listed the days of the week on the left side, and stuck it in the frame. Like the giant dork that I am, I was totally excited to find a font called “chalkduster”!!! Get it? Like a cafe chalkboard??

Voila, a fun menu board that I can use with a dry erase marker, which wipes right off the glass for the next week of meals.

You can make this as pretty and fluffy as you like, if those kinds of things excite you. You can use scrapbook paper and vinyl cut out letters and just go crafty crazy. For me, an appropriately titled font choice was exciting enough.

So, we’ll see if this helps out with my meal planning malaise and keeps dinner from getting too repetitive...because I'm a grown up now, and Evol frozen burritos (delish as they are) might not be appropriate every night.