Printable Meal Menu / Calendar

There was some interest after a recent post I made about meal planning, and how I hope it will help me save some time and some money. Thanks for all the kind comments regarding the "belt tightening" and wonderful suggestions!!

I have been on the calendar for a week now and am LOVING how little stress I have about meal time- and that all the ingredients are on my shelves! I went to work and put together an excel calendar to share with you (and also because I know I will likely lose the one in my notebook! Haha.) 

Here is the link to my printable meal menu calendar: Click here . There is also a template to print/make your own. I *think* all you need to do is copy it into excel or save a copy to your own computer. Hopefully that will work!

A few things about the meals:

• My husband insists on MEAT at every meal. We have a freezer full of (grass fed, local) beef and elk. I would love to eat more fish than we do...I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for 2 years.
• We also eat a lot of frozen or canned foods because it's a) easy to store and we live in the sticks, and, b) it's usually cheaper. I'd LOVE to eat more fresh produce, but alas, it doesn't always keep until we get to the store again. We have a second refrigerator to keep some things in.
• When I cook meat, I ALWAYS double the volume I need for one meal when thawing and cooking. Then I store away the extra meat for the next meal, (or a meal later that week). This saves me every time! You can refreeze cooked burger, chicken etc... and then microwave it to thaw if needed.
• I have planned a lot of my meals to use this doubled meat strategy: back to back meals like roast beef Sunday and enchiladas Monday (using roast beef) are an example.
• When making something like enchiladas or lasagna, why not make 2 at one time and freeze one for another "emergency" meal? Half the clean-up, almost half the cooking.
• I use a lot of bread from a recipe I found. It isn't the best tasting bread I've ever had, but it is FAST to make and nutritious. I double the recipe to make enough for 4 loaves and freeze the dough to use for my homemade pizza shells.
• I like exciting food- but my kids don't ...so we compromise.

Anyway, I hope this helps even one other person out there! Please let me know if you have any good ideas to add in.

Running related: 7 miles this morning at a slow/easy recovery pace. I still need to do some daily core stuff, though.

1600 Repeats and Time to Tighten the Belt (more)

The training part
It was cold (for here) this morning- right around 34F. Today's workout plan was for 10 miles with 3 x 1600 at 6:26.  Usually it takes me a while to warm up and sometimes I'll go 5 miles before doing intervals or tempo runs.

After 2.5 warm up, I turned around and started looking for the milepost. About a half a mile later I was there and beeped my watch for the first 1600.

Normally, the first is my slowest.  Today I kept that in mind and tried to put forth a bit more effort going out of the gate. I had a lot of recovery running time between intervals (would have liked a bit less, I wanted 800, but got more like 1200 or even 1600 one time) due to my pre-mapped routes and using the mileposts. This isn't rocket science (though sometimes I like to pretend it is) and sometimes we just have to adapt to our training scenarios. 

My splits were 6:05, 6:26 (opposite direction on same stretch, but on the money!) and 6:20.

Tightening the belt
Like so many others right now, my family is faced with some economic struggles. (I say this and realize we are doing so much better than 90% of the world (Praise God)...but it's harder than we are used to). My husband is in the middle of a huge work slowdown and has also had customers who were either slow to pay or just say they can't pay (yet).

One thing we both have agreed to do is to try to become more efficient and less wasteful of what we have- including groceries. Our goal is to spend less in this area, but still maintain healthy nutrition guidelines (and feed a marathon training mom!).

Jon asked me to write a dinner menu  calendar that we could use to make our shopping lists with. I was happy to oblige! When I did this in the past, I found it made meal prep easier, as I had the ingredients I needed on hand and I wasn't scratching my head for ideas at the last minute.



Have you ever used a meal calendar?

If so, what's your experience been with it?

What meals are winners at your house? I recycle a lot of meal ideas and my big problems is keeping things interesting and simple at the same time, while using food the kids will still eat.