How to have never ending menus

Has menu planning been your nemesis? It certainly has been mine. I could never for the life of me decide what we were going to have for dinner because I didn't like cooking and that was due in part because the whole ordeal seemed to be a chore ESPECIALLY when I didn't know what I was going to be making for dinner that night.

If you were like me, you visited the net for blogs, searched for pre planned menus, or maybe you even called up your girlfriend and asked her what shes having for dinner that night. Yes, I have done all those things and I still ended up clueless and frustrated.

One day I had an epiphany. I use Google Calendar to plan all the things in life that need to be mapped out so I figured why not plan out what we will be eating from day to day?

I felt like I should have been nominated for a Nobel Prize just for the mere IDEA of it all. Not that making a week long menu hasn't been attempted by me and millions of people before, but not to this level that I'm about to get into.

In Google Calendar, you can set up events to reoccur every day, week, every 2 weeks, every 3 weeks, every month, year, ect ect ect. What I decided was to do 31 days of menus, and have them all to reoccur once every month. That way, I will have a menu for everyday of the week henceforth and forever more. Not only that, you can set up each meal and send invitations to the event to whomever you choose ie your always hungry family members. Now your husband and children will never have to ask you that dreaded question: "Whats for dinner???" and you will no longer have to look like this: :-I They will receive an email with that days menu listed.

Here's where the hard work comes in. Now you have got to come up with all these menus. Don't panic though! Take your time. It took me 2 weeks to do it. I went to the library and checked out a grand total of 2 cookbooks. I made sure before I took them home that they were full of recipes that I would want to make that had few ingredients. Added to my arsenal was previous meals I had made that me and my family loved and my crock pot. If I had to have instructions for making a particular meal, I typed in the ingredients as well as the instructions in the note portion of the event on the calendar.

If you don't have a Google account I seriously urge you to get one so that you can use the Calendar. Its a life saver and now it makes cooking somewhat enjoyable because the stress of being ignorant of what we are having is gone. An added bonus to it all is that I can now shop according to whats on the menu for the week and that cuts down on the grocery bill.

Since Google allows you to embed your calendar Im actually going to let you benifit from that mind numbing brain twisting work that I went thru for those two weeks and let you see my menu