Meal Planning - Part 1

Organizing Your Kitchen

*An important first step to meal planning is getting your kitchen organized.  If you can’t find, or don’t know what you have in your kitchen it is hard to plan a meal that is cost effective.  This will also help ensure food does not go to waste.  

Steps to Organize Your Kitchen:

1.  Inventory Your Foods (This includes your pantry, cabinets, refrigerator and freezer.)

2.  Decide What are Your Staple Products (Things that you always have around.)

3.  Turn Your Inventory Into Lists

Inventory Your Foods:

     This can be tedious to start out, but is super simple to keep up with.  First you will want to grab a note pad and have a page for every cabinet, pantry,. . .   Write down what you have and how many you have.  For example: I have 5 cans of tomato paste.  Don’t get too specific, that can make things complicated.  If you need to know an exact amount when you look at your recipe you can dig out that can and see exactly how big it is, but at least you know you have a can in your pantry.  

     

Once you finish your lists you are ready to decide what your staple products are.  

Decide What are Your Staple Products:

     This step can vary greatly between each household.  These are the items that once you run out of you immediately add back to your grocery list.  For me these things include spices, flour, sugar, rice, and dry pasta.  I have a few others too, but those are the essentials.  

     Once you have an idea of what you want to call a staple product you can go through your lists and draw a line through them.  I don’t find a need to keep track of things like flour when the second it is gone it is added to the grocery list.  

     Now that you have edited notes you can turn them into lists to tape inside of your pantry and cabinets, and attach to your refrigerator and freezer.  

Turn Your Inventory Into Lists:

     I usually don’t type mine, but for sharing purposes and my poor handwriting I decided to type them.  I use half sheets of paper to make the lists and I put the number of each item at the end so that I can cross through the number and write a new number.  

     The lists work both ways, you can add new items easily to the list when you get them, or add amounts, or you can easily subtract amounts.  When a sheet gets too messy just copy any relevant information onto a new sheet and tape it up in the place of the old sheet.  

*Now that you know exactly what you have and how much you have you are ready to move on to making a weekly meal plan.  

You can download a full copy of this inventory sheet to print on 8.5 X 11in. paper HERE.