I am just wondering if anyone/everyone cooks dinner every night?  And if yes, do you shop for the week and have a menu for the week?  Do you plan for leftovers?  I would like to be more organized about this but could use some direction.

Thanks

Pat

I cook everyday. I shop every other week and I think about what I'd like to make in those 2 weeks and shop accordingly. I don't have a set schedule for what I'll make everyday but I buy in bulk and plan my meal schedule every 2-3 day at a time.

I LOVE to cook and do so most nights.  Every week on Friday night or Saturday morning I plan a menu in advance and shop for the ingredients needed over the weekend.  I have a ton of cookbooks and mark the pages with post-it notes so they're easier to find when I'm ready to prepare meals.  I also love recipe websites like allrecipes.com, myrecipes.com, foodnetwork.com, and food.yahoo.com.  There are tons of others that can be found with a Google search.

I normally choose meals that are either quick or that I can do any major prep work (marinades, chopping veggies, etc.) the night prior after the baby goes to bed or while my hubby plays with her in the evening.  Wraps, casseroles, and crockpot meals are by far the easiest if you have limited time.  As for leftovers, my husband takes them to work the next day or for a couple days (or shares with coworkers), so when I make something like a whole chicken or pork loin, I do those earlier in the week.  I'm not a big fan of leftovers, so that works out well for us.  On the weekends I don't cook so much, as we visit our families and have dinner with them.

You didn't state the age of your child/children, so I'm unsure if you need to incorporate their tastes into meals.  My baby is almost 1 year and eats things like chicken, fresh veggies, fruits, and some baby foods.  Most of the time I prepare her food separate, as she still eats with her hands and doesn't care for some foods such as pasta.  I'm lucky because she sits in her highchair and happily eats while I cook.

It's taken me a while to get into a routine, so cut yourself some slack if you don't get über organized right off the bat.  When Hope was first born, I rarely cooked and my body showed the evidence! haha  I have gotten to the point where cooking dinner is a scheduled task for us so the baby expects to be in the kitchen everyday with mommy.

I hope this helps you some.  Let me know if you want to know things in further detail or want some yummy quick recipes. :)

Take care,

Michelle

Hi Michelle I would love some quick easy recipes!!

a good website is bhg.com also

Check out Flylady.com.

It's a good site to teach you how to organize your life(schedule), how to make meal plans, grocery lists, how to plan out your house cleaning and decluttering.

You don't have to follow everything you see on the website, but I promise you if you take the time to read some of the advice it will change your life because after I visited this website I finally got a grasp on how to keep my house in order everyday and not go crazy cleaning all day and still having a messy house.

If you do check it out and you like it, please let me know, cause I am curious to see if it helps anybody else like it helped me.

Roxanne

I have 3 years old twins.  My husband does the marketing once a week.  He will make use of his office lunch time to buy all the things I want from the list given to him.  He will keep all the things into his office refrigerator and bring back home after office.

I cook almost everyday because I love to cook.  On weekends I cook only one meal a day as we will be out for family outings.

I believe in keeping essential cooking staff like chicken, prawn, beef, some vegetables and other food seasoning so that when I want to cook some dishes I like it is all there.

You must love cooking otherwise it goes down to zero even with good tips given.

i cook dinner almost everyday.  some nights we order pizza or chinese and once a week we go to my parents house.  i have always wanted to make a weekly menu but never get around to doing it.  we order out usually 2 times a month, the rest of the time i cook.  i grew up in a home where my mom or dad cooked dinner everynight so thats how i want my kids to grow up, its good family time and i know they are eating good foods.

breakfast is the same and so is lunch but we just wing it witht hose.  dinner is planned throughout the day and i always start it at 5 so we eat by 5:30-6pm.

My husband and I will sit down and look through our cook books and pick out enough meals for about 2 wks, but with leftovers (if he doesn't take them all to work for lunches) and the staples I keep in the house just in case we need a quick dinner or we just don't feel like eating whats on the list we can get by for about 2 1/2 wks. the only thing we go to the store for about once a wk is milk.

I just started doing this about 6-8 months ago cause we found that if we didn't we ended up buying more snack foods than meal stuff.

I usually always have frozen veggies, chicken broth, olives, tomato sauce, cheese, canned chicken, tuna, spaghetti, burger, mac & cheese, canned diced tomatoes, and other noodles on hand. The canned stuff and the noodles I buy in bulk if I can. You can always come up with something if you have some of that on hand and with some spices of course.

You'll get the hang of it, it took us a little bit but it helped once our daughter could eat what we are eating.