Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping Made Easy! Finally!

I have decided to completely admit something. I love grocery shopping. I have tried over and over to come up with a method that works for me and have finally found a winner. I downloaded some pretty meal planning worksheets from here - they had tons of them! Most of the ideas I have tried and they never completely worked. I had tried to make a calendar with the meal plans for each day but with an always changing schedule, they didn't always work so I still ended up buying food I didn't use. Or I made menus and put them in a box sorted by breakfast, lunch and dinner, but there wasn't enough variety and I still ended up making different things for my family. My husband likes spontaneity (in everything) and I like to PLAN! So here's what I did, I used the sheet that is pictured here and just planned out 7 of everything. I asked my hubbie what he would like to eat this week and used his ideas and included some of my own. I also used recipes I had been wanting to try but never had the ingredients on hand. I made a shopping list for the 7 meals and went shopping. As the week progressed, I just looked at my list of meals and depending on the ease of the meal, schedule, or what I felt like cooking, or what my hubbie wanted that night, I made our meals! I had options to chose from which helped my husband's need for spontaneity, and my need to PLAN! YAY!!! JACKPOT! I love it when I can combine our two personalities and come up with something beautiful! It worked well for the first week and it's Monday again so time for another meal plan. I'm really looking forward to what we can come up with for this week.