Seasonal Meal Plans

I read about this idea somewhere (probably a blog, if it's you, I'd love to give you credit) and thought it was basically ingenius:

The idea is that you lay out basically a month's worth of meals that you know your family likes, create shopping list for each week, and then you can just print off (or create in a cool iPod app) that week's list when it's time to go shopping.  It eases weekly shopping and planning.  We just switched from our winter plan to our spring plan, and it was an exciting change.

Because we only ate each meal in the grid once a month, I didn't really get sick of them.  I did notice, though, which ones weren't actually my favorites.  I made a note on them to sub them out for something different next year.  I also modified this grid by adding more room for trying new recipes, and left space at the bottom to log recipes we wanted to try and the locations of those recipes, so they'd be easy to find when it was time to make that week's list.

I have been really pleased with this system and how much it has automated an area of my life where I used to spend quite a bit of time on a weekly basis.  I know that once we have a year's worth of meals and we are just tweaking and adding new recipes, it will work even better.  Now, if I could only make myself follow this same sort of plan for cleaning...