I have been trying different things so that meal planning can be done. This is mainly because I’ve noticed if I have the meal planned, the food purchased and then we don’t go out as much. The temptation really isn’t even there because I know the food is at home and I feel like I’ve wasted money and time if we don’t eat at home. So last month I got the meal planning done — just went week by week – and we stuck to it fairly well. It didn’t fall apart until — yup you guessed it I wasn’t on top of things and we didn’t have a meal plan. Well now we do and I’m back on top of it. One thing that needed to be resolved was how to keep everything together so that the food I had just purchased didn’t get used in another meal (breakfast or lunch) or get snacked on. I was on pinterest one day and someone had pinned a bin idea. So I checked it out and what this gal does is when she gets home from shopping she puts everything for the meal for each day in the bin along with the meal for that night. I took it a step further and put the recipe for the meal (if one is needed) as well so I don’t have to search for the recipe. I do have all the recipes that we use on a regular basis in a binder, in page protectors.
I found a great blog where she plans the meals her family eats for a year. She has a lot of great printables to organize your binder, and some great blogs to go to for recipes. I’m not quite to the year phase of it but I”m doing it weekly at least and hopefully will get to a month soon – it just seems like everything changes in our schedule so fast that the monthly plan doesn’t work as well. But weekly or even every two weeks. I also went to this blog, and she has some great weekly menu planning printables (and monthly too), that I use. I keep the weekly one on the fridge and we cross off what we didn’t like, because we are trying a lot of new recipes (thanks Pinterest). Then I’m keeping the entire month of menu’s to base the next month’s meals off of. And I still have the recipes cos they’re in the binder in a page protector. I wish I could find some recipe templates that I can copy and paste my recipe’s on. The ones that are in the first blog (the year long planning) are in PDF and I can’t edit them. 
The first picture is the recipe in the bin and off to the side is all the ingredients, the 2nd picture is everything in the bin and the 3rd is all the bins lined up on top of our cabinets. We don’t have much room where we are living so this is the only place to put them.
My Family Times 