Weekly Menu Board

I’ve been a meal planner for years.  I have changed my methods as the situation suits.  Before kids when I worked full time, I would plan for about 3 weeks at a time.  Now that we have kids, are more health conscious, and are buying more fresh foods, I shop about once a week so I plan for about 7 or 8 meals at a time. 

This helps a ton with the shopping.  Execution…not so much.

It seems that I always forget to thaw something or don’t get the stuff in the crock pot early enough on days that I’m planning a slow cooker meal. 

I usually write down a tentative menu and put it on my fridge, but it’s so small, I rarely look at it on a regular business and just try to commit it to memory. 

Big fail this week.  I thawed a whole roaster chicken, a chuck roast, and a sirloin roast all this week and have failed miserably at getting them cooked.  (come on!  The sirloin roast is supposed to take 8-10 hours!  That’s a lot of forethought!)

So I’ve seen different “dry-erase” menu boards across the blogosphere like this one at Under the Table.  So I put my own spin it tonight and it took me all of an hour to make. 

I found this art frame at Wal-Mart for $14.00.  It’s 12 x 16 inches.  Nice and big

It swings open so you can store more kids art behind the frame, but instead I’m going to take advantage of the space and store the recipe cards for any recipes that I need that week.  Then they aren’t being moved all over the kitchen throughout the week after I pick them out. 

I bought a couple different fabrics at Jo-Ann’s.  The red one is like the material of reusable grocery bags that are being sold EVERYWHERE.  I was kind of surprised that they sold this kind of fabric and will have to file that away in my head for future use. 

The white one is some kind of towel fabric.  It’s cotton, has just a little bit of texture, and I was able to fray the edges after I cut the selvage off.  I found them both by the utility/burlap fabric.  That’s all I needed to know.

I bought a half yard of each for $4.00 total.  I could have used my coupon, but I forgot…oh well.  (There was a lot of extra red because it’s 60 inch wide fabric)

I cut the fabrics down to size, the red to fit snug (12 x 16) and the white an inch smaller all the way around (10 x 14).   I frayed the white edges some and glued them both to the paper sample picture that came in the frame.

Then using my Silhouette and Core’dinations cardstock, I cut out letters for the title and the first letter for each day of the week.  I lightly sanded the black Core’dinations to show the dark red through on the edges. 

Space them out where I wanted them (about every two inches down the side) and pop it back in the frame!  Easy Breezy!

I hung it on the blank end of my kitchen cabinets in a highly visible place using a couple of command hooks.  Then just use a dry erase marker on the glass to write down the meal for each day and it is an instant erasable surface!

Now if this doesn’t help me be more organized, then I’m a lost cause!