Meal Planning & Grocery Shopping

Last night I was talking to a friend and she was saying that she had no idea what she was going to cook for dinner today but she needed to come up with a plan or they would end up going out to eat. When I got in bed, I was thinking . . I wish I could be a little more like that. We’re all different and the best thing for me is to know what I expect of myself and do it.

If I don’t write things down, they just don’t happen but once I write them down . . it takes a lot for me to change my mind.

Here’s this week’s menu plan:

Hopefully you can read this (if you want to read it). Not only is the menu for our meals there and I designate what is being made from a jar of home canned food with the (J) next to it. Thursday we eat at the hospital. Also at the bottom of the days I plan to do canning, I have listed what I plan to can. Today was beef in wine sauce. Got that done.

Four chuck roasts made 6 quarts but they did have big bones in them, which I cut out and did not use in this recipe. I have several other roasts in the fridge defrosting and I’ll make a larger batch of this later in the week. I think there are two chuck roasts and three arm roasts in this batch.

Here’s the menu for next week and you can see that I’m cooking Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. All of those meals are ones we like and they work well as leftovers so Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we’re having leftovers.

Even though I pretty much stick with the menu plan, I can make some amount of changes. This week, I have sliders on the menu for Saturday. I cook those outside on the griddle and if it’s going to be raining, I will switch it to another day and then fix whatever was on the menu for that day on Saturday.

I love searching recipes and finding ones that look interesting so I really enjoy making meal plans and using new recipes.

When I bought refrigerator bins for the new garage fridge a month or so back, I bought these bins as extras for the fridge but I have found so many uses for them. This is the large bin and there is a medium bin but I’m not seeing it online.

The medium bin (shown above) perfectly holds six quarts. I do most of the work getting the jars filled, cleaned and sealed upstairs, then take them downstairs to the basement to do the actually pressure canning. When I have a lot of jars to carry down, I can carry 12 quarts in the boxes the jars came in but that’s terribly heavy for me to go downstairs with that much weight. I can put 6 jars in the box but even with the cardboard insert, those jars can wiggle around and even fall over so that isn’t safe. I can carry them down, two at a time, with a pot holder because they are HOT. That would take six trips up and down the stairs IF there are 12 jars. I’m so happy to be able to safely carry six quarts in those bins. They have handles and when it’s a heavy load, I will double the bins (stack one inside the other) and that makes me feel better.

Another thing I do – when I have five or six roasts, or 10 one pound packages of ground beef to defrost, I fill one of the large bins and stick it in the fridge. No dripping. No mess. I leave it in the basement fridge until it’s defrosted and ready to be canned (the meat in the left bin is to be canned) or, I’ll take out one piece at a time and leave the rest in there – no mess! The bin on the right is the rest of the meat I need for this week.

I also use these bins for bringing things upstairs and downstairs. When we’re out shopping or ordering through the mail, all that arrives upstairs and much of it has to be brought downstairs.

This is a bin I’ve been adding things to that will go downstairs.

I think these are the most useful bins and I think even the large ones are less than $5.