Tip #1: Meal Planning If You Don't Have a Grocery Store in Your Front Yard

We used to have the luxury of living across the street (literally) from my favorite grocery store. I'd stop by a few times a week after work or in the mornings, just roaming around and deciding what I needed on the spot for a few dinners.

Then we moved. At first is was a bit of a shock. You mean I have to drive 15 minutes to find a grocery store!? How does anyone live like this!? Then I realized that this is how EVERYONE else lives.

For us, it became practical to only grocery shop once a week. And that meant a lot of planning. I would sit down the night before with my cookbooks, recipes and the internet trying to come up with a week's worth of meals. Cooking is a chore to me, not a pleasure, and therefore this planning was an arduous task.

Then I devised a system. Let's call it a "rotating meal schedule," for lack of any other name. Here is how I did it:

• I sat down once again with my cookbooks, recipes and the internet. But this time I made a list of any and every meal that my family would possibly eat. I came up with 35 meals. Enough for 5 weeks.
• I sorted the meals into categories (chicken, beef, pork, meatless...). Then I made a list for each week by plugging in a few meals from each category.
• Now I have a master list of meals hanging on my fridge to refer to each week. Once I get to the end of the 5 weeks it just starts over.

To save even more time in the store, I write down the ingredients in the order of the store isles. Maybe this all sounds ridiculously organized. But it helps me maintain some of my sanity.