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Written by Heather Jones
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 Planning your weekly menu can be a daunting task. Even if your cabinets are stocked and your fridge is full, how do you figure out what to do with it all?
You may not believe me, but I find this to be the fun part!
I admit it, maybe I'm a little strange. I'm constantly going through my Project Foodie recipe box, searching cookbooks and looking at anything food related for new meals to make each week. But, you need not obsess to be able to plan a weekly menu. Putting together a menu for the week should take no more than a half hour of your time. And that much time only because you'll keep running back to your pantry to see what you have on hand (and because you have a few cookbooks spread out trying to see which recipe you can afford and/or want to try).
Here are some tips that help me with my menu planning:
Cook a different theme each night you cook. For example, my family has a different theme each night I cook: sandwich night, family favorite, vegetarian and new dish night. Other examples would be pasta night, seafood night, pizza night and so forth. Once you have a pattern of dinner themes, menu planning is simply a matter of picking the meals for each theme.
Think about what your family likes and dislikes. Try to incorporate their favorites frequently, but also try new things occasionally too.
Have some recipes you want to try picked out. Project Foodie is a great place for that as is the "try" tag to find a quick list of what you've found that you want to try.
Check out your pantry and the weekly ads. The idea is to pull together items in your pantry with items that are on sale and family favorites to make a good meal with minimum effort and money. For example, if ground turkey is on sale then how about pairing it with some of those kidney beans in your pantry to make chili. Or you could use canned tomatoes and make a tasty Bolognese sauce.
Got more tips? We'd love to hear what tricks you use to help you plan your weekly menu…
Disclosure: Samples of products discussed in this post may have been provided to Project Foodie by publicists and/or manufacturers.
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