Simple Ideas to Make Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping Easier

Meal planning and grocery shopping are chores that not many of us relish.  Hopefully, these tips will help simplify your life.

My husband loves it when I make a menu for the week.  Problem was, it was constantly changing, and I didn't like to view a scribbled document on my refrigerator.  Then one night, I thought about how to solve this issue with materials that I had around the house.  Using fishing line, tacks, clothes pins, and some paper, I made this:

The clothes pins have the days of the week on them and are clipped to the fishing line that is tacked to the wall.  It is easy to rearrange meals if needed.  We find that we basically eat the same 10-14 meals, so we reuse the slips of the paper.

My husband is also infamous for asking if I need anything from the grocery store as he is walking out the door.  Put on the spot, I seem to always forget what I want.  Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful that is the primary grocery shopper, but often we don't get all that we wanted to make the meals that we planned.  Therefore, I made a list of items that we buy on a regular basis in a spreadsheet.  I categorized it based on the layout of the grocery store and alphabetically in each category.  I am able to update it as needed.