foodie friday:meal planning

my first attempt at meal planning was almost a year ago. i do great for about 6 weeks and then go through a period of frenzied trips to wal-mart in search of last minute ingredients and end up with an overstocked pantry. then i clean out the pantry and try to meal plan again. i do enjoy it, sometimes things just get the best of me and i get too busy to figure out what we're going to eat and how much food i need to buy.

i love it because it makes it so easy when i come home from work knowing exactly what i am going to make. i love that i can plan for harder to prepare meals or crockpot meals on the days i stay home so i can easily work on them during the day. lance loves that it keeps our pantry organized (a relative term) and that it saves money. i don't know if i really spend less on food (i'm not organized enough to keep track of stuff like that) but i do know that cutting back our wal-mart trips to one, maybe two a week has drastically cut back on the random purchases.

so menu planning is a good thing for me and i try to keep it up. we normally do our big shopping trip on sundays so i try to have everything planned out by saturday afternoon.

here is our sample menu for the upcoming week:
saturday: leftovers from dinner out last night and fresh bread
sunday: blackened catfish, squash/onions/peppers on the grill, salad
monday: fish tacos and fresh salsa (pioneer woman's resturant salsa)
tuesday: grilled chicken, oven roasted brocolli and salad
wednesday: eat out
thursday: grilled chicken pizza (rachel ray recipe)
friday: steak, sweet potato fries, salad

here are a few references on getting started in meal planning:
meal planning 101
the benefits of meal planning