And I don’t even WANT fried food. Like, I woke up totally cool. I think one of the biggest things I am going to be able to do to facilitate this no fried food thing is to not eat out. When I really think about it, when was the last time I whipped up some french fries at home? uhhhh…. I can’t even sort of remember… but I eat them… pretty much every time I go out I eat french fries… so I will spend today getting my monthly meal planner back in order.

What is the monthly meal planner you ask? Well, it is this: I have mapped out the menu in a simple word document that basically has everything we are going to eat for the week, all the ingredients on a shopping list, and then any recipes for anything that I think might need a recipe to make. I put it all in a binder with page protectors, and bam… I have each week with five meals (I’m not superwoman… we eat out at least twice!) and my family has home cooked meals pretty much all week. I even have a little folder for each week stuck in the binder where I keep extra copies of the shopping lists so I can just grab them and go when I am in a hurry. This works out so great, and I have had so many people in the grocery store comment on my lists!

I only have three weeks worth of meals so far, and I want five… I feel like if we haven’t eaten something in five weeks, then surely we would be okay to eat it again… but I don’t like to cook, or at least won’t cook everything on my three weeks yet… like I want them perfect I want to open up the recipe to whatever week we are in and be like bam…. I am cooking any of these five things tonight and I totally want to. So today, I plan on working and spending a little time prepping the list and just refining it.

I kind of feel like that is part of the whole stay at home thing… to try to make sure my family eats healthy meals… the other thing I would like to see in my list is at least one crock pot meal a week. I think the crock pot is AWESOME and if I could include it in my life at least once a week, then I think that would make my life that much easier… so I plan to try to move and mix things around and get to using that crock pot more… because dude… you SO can’t fry things in the crock pot, right?