Sorry for falling out of flow with my schedule, but Friday turned out much busier than planned. I’m back to share some ideas about menu planning with you.

It’s very easy to get into a rut with our weekly shopping and making meals. Instead of letting that determine our reality, it’s helpful to get intentional about our daily round. What we eat daily is what becomes our body. We know that, but putting it into practice can be challenging.

What works for me is to use my favorite cookbooks and pick meals from them that I’m familiar with. I use those as a generic palette to choose my weekly meals around, and then plug in other things like vegetables and pre-biotic foods.

If you need a good starting point, I hope you find this useful: Menu Plan. It’s a word document that uses tables, and I print it out weekly and put it up on the fridge.

Here’s how I make it work for me, though: I don’t just plan the week, I make notes about what worked and what didn’t. This is how, for example, I figure out when particular meals take too long to prep on nights when I have other commitments. For those nights, we’ll put in, say, tuna salad instead of roast pork.

We also plan large meals once a week for Sundays, typically, depending on our hiking schedule. That lets us drag out all the old favorites: roast chicken, pork loin, mashed potatoes, and all sorts of goodies. Don’t forget desert – with a little planning ahead, pies and fruit crumbles aren’t difficult to make.

What’s your secret for your daily round? What works for you?