Planning meals
This part of the lesson will be more of a reference for you to start planning for the future.
I would recommend making a Master menu of different meals that you enjoy making while you are at home. Ask your parents for a blank recipe book for Christmas or as a birthday gift. After you have made the recipe yourself and know that it is good, add it to your book. Don’t just write down ones you don’t try and assume they are good—because a lot of time they are not. Write down only tried and true recipes. You can continual add to them throughout the years of you making food. ONLY add them if you have made them and people enjoy eating them.
In your household binder–which I recommend doing in one of my Home Economic books. Basically it is a 3 ring binder with tabs. Each tab is for a different area of the home. You might have one for school ideas–as you collect ideas you write them down and add them to your binder then as you are older and have children you can use them. For this part of our course you can have a tab for recipes and add directions on how to make your favorite meals as well.
Having this list will help you in preparing meals for the week, when you are on your own. I like to organize them according to type:
- Soups
- Sandwiches
- Italian
- Mexican
- Casseroles
- Quick fix meals
- Hearty meals—like meatloaf, Salisbury steak, etc
- Chicken meals
- Crock pot dishes
- Grilled meals
- Baked items
- Desserts, according to seasons. Apples for fall, ice cream for summer, etc.
Your next step would be to create a monthly or weekly menu. You can create a simple sketch of a menu on paper or do it in Microsoft Word by creating a table.
Here are two blank menus for you to print off and keep for your records.
I like to choose certain meals depending upon how my week is going:
- Monday—-easy casseroles(Monday’s are typically hurried from the weekend, this works well)
- Tuesday—soups and sandwiches(I can use the soup for lunch during the baking day tomorrow)
- Wednesday—Italian dishes (that is our baking day and we have fresh baked bread that goes well with this meal.)
- Thursday—chicken dish
- Friday—Crockpot meal (this works well as we are out running errands and dinner cooks while we are gone.)
- Saturday—hearty meals(these are good for ones that require more prep because I am usually home and have more time to commit to dinner.)
- Sunday—quick fix meals (keeping it simple for church.)
Everyone’s plan is going to be different according to what works for their family. This is just a recommendation of what we use.
Here is a video of how we do this:
