Meal Planning Pt.1: Why I plan my meals once a month

 December will be here tomorrow and so it is time to plan my monthly menus again.  I have been planning my menus by the month since visiting Jon's mom last August. She gave me a book called Once a Month Cooking  by Mary Beth Lagerborg and Mimi Wilson that I read and started to apply in our household.  It is a great book that has ways to save money through planning and cooking only once a month.  Sample menus and recipes are included.  Each day, you pull a meal out of the refrigerator or freezer for supper that night, heat and serve.  Voila! 

This book answered a lot of the frustrations I had had at supper time.  I hated the question "what's for dinner?" when Jon got home from work because I would realize I had no idea.  I would scrounge around and pull out something, realizing I was missing one or two ingredients.   Back to the pantry I would go...only to make something that neither of us really liked or head out the door to eat out.  I saw that we wasted a lot of money eating out, buying food that we didn't eat, and throwing away leftovers.  I decided that we needed to change.

Tomorrow I will be posting the second part of "Meal Planning" and will focus on how I do it.  If you have anything that you do that you find works, please feel free to post your suggestions.