Nina's Soap

Have you ever come home from work and wonder what you would cook for dinner? Many times a week I feel like I don’t know what to cook for my family of seven. I tried to create a meal plan for two months and selected 2 weeks meals for my monthly meal calendar. It didn’t work for long as we try to eat seasonally. For instance, we ate a lot of lettuce in summer when the garden was full of it. Now we are in winter and I don’t buy lettuce at the grocery store. We also plan meal around what we have in the pantry and what is on sale. If potato is on sale and I cannot store it for long, I might make potato dishes more than once a week. For example, we are out of potato and we are out of our food budget which means I won’t cook potato dish for the rest of the month of January. Luckily, I have  leftover potato soup I froze that I could serve and I might go through my canned food to see if I have canned potatoes left. I would use them in soup. It a great way to get creative and use what I have around the house.

Because of all these changes, two months meal plan or two weeks meal plan is too narrow of a window to plan my meals on for every month of the year. Therefore, I am going to record what I cook every single day for one year.

Every dish my family appreciates would be added to my food recipe repertoire and could be accessed from my meal calendar page.

At the end of the year, not only I would have one year meal calendar, but also the quantity of each ingredient I used in one year. This would help me in building my one year working food pantry. It also helps decide how much to buy of an ingredient when it is on sale without buying to little or too many.

You can track yours as well using a spreadsheet  or Google drive spreadsheet for easy access on the go.

I would also setup a spreadsheet of a list of ingredients I use in cooking and update the quantity used. By the end of the year, I would know how much I used for each item.

I might display the spreadsheet later.

My meal calendar would be in constant update. Please feel free to take a pic times to times. It can be accessed from the sidebar under “Posts Archives”. I would link to my recipes as well.