Hi everyone!!  Hope you’re all doing great.  Today I’m sharing about something that I always struggle with : Meal planning!!  Hehe!  I absolutely love spending time working on my daily planner but when it comes to planning the week’s meals, I just want it to be over with!  I either draw a blank or I speed right through because I just copied and pasted the previous week’s menu!  Hehe!

I tried new things lately and it has helped me a lot with my meal planning.  I realised that it is easier for me if I had a physical database of dishes to choose from rather than just try to think of dishes at the top of my head.  So,    I recently purchased a Happy Planner Recipe Organiser and I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now.  I had an old recipe notebook that was really gross with all the food stains and oil splashes and I decided to revive it using this new recipe organiser.  I copied a few of our favorite recipes into it and I embellished them with tiny bits from our kits.

These two recipes were embellished using bits and pieces from the South Beach memory keeping kits.

This recipe was made using the Farmer’s Market planner kit.  I just love how our Cocoa Daisy items can be used even in a recipe organiser.   So versatile!   I have a process video of this in here.

My plan is to continue documenting our family favourites until this organiser is filled to the brim.  Embellishing these recipe pages are actually more fun than cooking, hehe.

I also have this goal of feeding my family healthier meals by adding more fruit and vegetable options during meal times.  I’m using this 4 x 6 monthly pocket card to track whether our dishes had vegetable servings at a particular day.  I’m marking these days with the stamp set.  Hopefully I get to have at least 3-4 days where I have served vegetables.

Also, I noticed that we basically eat the same type of fruits and vegetables all the time, so in this section, I wrote down other fruit and vegetable options I should pick up at the supermarket.

In this section, I created a database of the food options that we basically rotate during the whole month.  I’m putting this list in front of me when planning so that I can easily pick out meals for the week.   I’m hoping to expand our meal repertoire over the next few months.

Instead of putting my weekly meal plan in my bullet journal planner, I decided to use these A5 weekly pages on my recipe organiser to jot down the week’s meals.  This is so that I could easily find recipes to plan about.   One of our older Cocoa Daisy stamp sets had these “lunch” and “dinner” phrases and I happily used them for this page.

By the way, I am subscribed to the A5 planner pages.  I trimmed the punched area so that I could re-punch it using my WRMK disc punchers.  So cool!

This Farmer’s kit was really one of my favorites because it is perfect for revamping my meal planning strategy.   For the first time in my life, I am finding it so fun to plan for our meals.  Hooray!!  Happy meal planning, everyone!

Ria