Make Mealtime Simple

If you’re like me, summertime is a time to play and be outside. In turn, my house gets neglected and we forget our usual school-time routines. We get home, dump the wet towels and laundry on the tile, fix dinner and get ready for the next day. If I’m up to it, I’ll throw a load of laundry in the washer and hope to remember to turn it on after we’ve showered and before we crawl into bed. Then, when the alarm goes off in the morning, we’re up and out the door again.

I don’t want us to live in a pigsty, but I also don’t want to miss out on something because we stayed home to clean and do yard work. If we have guests coming, I make sure the beds have clean sheets, the bathrooms are clean, and that we have drinks in the fridge.

I have written in the past about how to maintain your house with a busy family life by doing small things each day. These are things like doing the dishes while you cook, doing a daily load of laundry, and cleaning a little bit each day to prevent too much build-up. It all boils down to time management.

I’m the first to admit that I am a total nerd. In an effort to save time, I have created a spreadsheet with a list of my family’s favorite recipes. There are columns associated with each recipe that list the cooking times and the necessary grocery store and Costco ingredients. Each month, we pick out a total of 20 to 25 recipes. Then, we take the spreadsheet, which already has the grocery list, and we conquer it. My husband gets the grocery store items, and I get the Costco items.

When we get home, each recipe has a number associated with it, so we put all the ingredients for recipe #3 together in the pantry, label all the refrigerated ingredients for #3 so they don’t get eaten before we have a chance to make it and so on. Given this system, we’ve got our grocery shopping and labeling for the entire month down to less than two hours. Then, whomever gets home from work first, looks at the list of recipes, picks what they want, and gets dinner started. (Having a garden with consistently fresh vegetables helps during the summertime so produce doesn’t go bad. Also freezing some for the winter months helps with the budget).

Our monthly grocery budget is $500. At the beginning of the month, we get $500 cash and that’s our grocery money. I know, I already told you I am a total nerd! But this helps save my sanity. I hate the “what sounds good for dinner” dilemma, so we just eliminated it. If the kids complain about a recipe, they get to pick the menu for the following month.

When I am done with work for the day, I can do pretty much anything but swing by the grocery store to pick up dinner. This should give me more time to weed my garden or work on my house right? Maybe when school starts again, but right now, the lake is calling…

#homeessentials