Some thoughts on meal planning

(this is a current picture; yes there is a string of Christmas lights in the background because I left them up in my kitchen because I thought they were pretty and they make me happy)

I love to cook. I love to bake. I take great enjoyment out of spending my time preparing food that is not only nutritious but that my family enjoys eating. It's even better when my children help me because of their shared love of being in the kitchen preparing food. With that said, here is my confession: I have typically not been good at actually doing that consistently. I am not a planner. I have tried multiple times to get a good meal planning system down and always failed, usually due to my already stated planning problem.

Here are some things that I have learned along the way that do not work (for me) when it comes to meal planning:
*just planning to sit down with some paper and a few cookbooks to peruse through to come up with a 2 week plan will not happen successfully
*just going to the store (because of first point happening and me getting to pay-day without meals planned out) and buying a bunch of things I know we like and telling myself that I will just remember what I have and plan accordingly each day will not happen successfully
*having more than 2 or 3 cookbooks that I pull from when actually sitting down to plan my meals is too much to look through
*putting tabs within my cookbooks to mark recipes that look yummy will not actually make me remember that there are recipes in there that I would like to try
*first beating myself up after a failed attempt at a decent 2 week set of meals and then telling myself I will do better next time does not work. I always forget by the next time

Tomorrow, I will tell you the things that I have learned along the way that make meal planning successful, and I will share with you my current, fool-proof system. It's easy (though it takes a little bit of beginning work to get everything the way you like it), it's quick, and if it works for me it should work for you.