Menu Roulette

When it comes to our dinners, B and I are pretty structured. We (mostly me) will sit down on Saturday or Sunday and write out our menu for the week. From this, we create our shopping list. If we didn't do this, we would never have the proper ingredients on hand and the meat wouldn't be thawed* so we'd end up going out to eat and spending a ton of money. This also prevents multiple trips to the grocery store - instead, we just go once. We found that we were choosing the same recipes over and over again and not forcing ourselves to try anything new. Introducing menu roulette. Now, instead of just picking and choosing what we'll have, I take out all of our cookbooks, including a stack of random recipes, and open each one to a page. Whatever I land on or pull out of the stack is a dinner for the week. I won't lie, I've taken a few mulligans but for the most part, it's working very well. If we land on something we've already had, we pick again. My goal is to try every recipe in each of the books. This is also helping us save a ton of money. We only went out for dinner once in the month of January and I anticipate that again for February. As you know, we love us a good dinner out but at $50+ a pop, it ain't worth it. Spice up your routine a little and try menu roulette yourself - a co-worker has and so far she's digging it.

*We buy 99% of our meat in bulk from Sam's Club about 3 times a year. When we get home, we break down the packages into serving sizes, vacuum seal and freeze. We are looking into buying a stand alone freezer to keep in the garage and found one that we like. I could buy more ice cream then too!