Menu Board D.I.Y Success!

I've been working on a little project for a while now in the hopes of making our lives a little easier when it comes to meal times especially with baby #2 on the way! There is nothing I hate more than staring into the fridge every night trying to think of what to make for dinner!! It drives me CRAZY. It's also not much better when we sit down and try to make up a menu for the week because it ends up with a lot of "what do you want to eat this week?" "I don't know, what do you want to eat?" and I still end up going crazy.

Then I saw this awesome menu board idea on Pinterest and decided I need to make my own to see if this actually works or not. It's a pretty simple premise and I can't wait to start trying it out to see if it makes life a little easier for us.

Basically you write out all the meals that you like to eat (this part took forever trying to think of all the food we like to make) and each meal gets written on a separate little slip of paper. I colour coded mine based on kind of meat, so all the chicken recipes are on one colour of paper, and all the ground meat dishes are on one colour of paper etc. so that when I'm choosing meals for the week it's easier to vary the meats that we're eating. Pasta dishes got a separate colour and so did sandwiches regardless of the meat used. This divide make sense to me, but you can split up yours however you want!

Once you've got all your meals written out you put them all into a little cup/holder. Each week you select 7 new slips from the cup and stick them on the clothes pegs that correspond to the days you want to eat those meals. Once you have used the little cards you take them off the clothes pegs and move them over to the other cup. Once the first cup is empty and you've gone through your entire meal rotation you simply move all the slips back over to the first cup and start again!

The best part about this system is that you can easily re-arrange meals mid-week if you need to in case something pops up you forgot about, or you need to make an appointment etc. Just pop the necessary meal slips out of the clothes pegs and re-arrange as necessary. I also made up some plain white slips, and these are for "Dinner Out/Ordering In" and "Scrounge Night" because lets face it... who wants to cook something new every single night?!

At the bottom of the menu board is the recipe index. Most of the meals that we have in our regular rotation we don't need a recipe for, but there are a few that we still check, and of course as we add new meals to our rotation we need the recipe for those until they become old favourites as well. The recipes are printed on colour coordinated paper to the meal slips to make them easier to find and they are glued onto a large index card and then laminated. (because kitchen's are a messy place!) Having the recipes right here on the board rather than having to dig through cookbooks to find them was totally worth the extra time it took to type them up.

The recipe index as mentioned is totally expandable, so as we try new dishes we like that we want to include in our menu rotation it will be super easy to open up the rings and add in new index cards as necessary.

I'm super happy with how well the board turned out and I can't wait to hang it up and start using it! I'll update again in a few weeks with how we're making out using it. Having our meals planned out for the week will also make it so much easier to organize our grocery list and help to cut down on the amount of food that gets forgotten about in the fridge and has to get tossed out.

D.I.Y for the win!

Meatloaf Lasagna Roll Ups: A New Take on Leftovers

Yes, you read that correctly.... Meatloaf Lasagna Roll Ups. I was really hungry the other night for something tasty, and all I really had kicking around for dinner was random bits of leftovers. So I decided to get creative, and the result was a delicious and easy dinner!

I had some lasagna noodles, but not enough to make a whole lasagna, and not enough of anything else to make a whole one either for that matter! So I decided to try making some "Lasagna Rolls Ups." I had some leftover pasta sauce in the fridge and a little bit of cottage cheese, so I was set for that much. But then I was stumped about what meat to put in since I didn't have any ground meat at home. Then I remembered I had some of my Turkey Zucchini Meatloaf left, and decided to get creative!

Essentially I took two slices of meatloaf and crumbled them up, and then mixed it in with the pasta sauce to form a meat sauce for the lasagna roll ups. Since the meatloaf already had zucchini and onions as well as some seasonings, I didn't need to add anything else to the sauce.

I boiled the lasagna noodles, spread some cottage cheese, meat sauce, and a little grated cheese on each one, rolled them up and placed them in a baking dish, topped them with more sauce and cheese and then baked them till bubbly! They were super flavourful and were a great way to use up some of the smaller bits of stuff I had kicking around the house. Here's an "official" recipe guideline. I only had enough bits of stuff to make 6 rolls up, and I've guessed at how much cottage cheese and pasta sauce I had left. I've tried to over estimate so you're likely to have extra rather than run out. You can also easily increase the amount of all items to make a larger batch!

Meatloaf Lasagna Roll Ups:

Ingredients:

- 6 cooked lasagna noodles
- 2 slices of meatloaf
- 1 1/2 cups of sauce
- 3/4 cup cottage cheese
- grated cheese

Directions:

1. Pre-heat over to 400 degrees.
2. Break meatloaf up into small pieces and combine with pasta sauce. Heat mixture in small saucepan.
3. Spread pre-cooked lasagna noodles out on flat surface. Spread a spoonful of cottage cheese across each noodle, followed by a spoonful of sauce and a sprinkling of grated cheese. Don't add to much stuff or it will all fall out when you try to roll them!

 4. Gently roll up each noodle and place in baking dish with the seam facing down.

 

5. Add more sauce to the top of the noodles and sprinkle with more cheese.

 



6. Cover baking dish with tin-foil and bake for 40 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 5-10 minutes, or until cheese is browned and bubbly. Enjoy!

Your Turn!

How do you eat your leftover meatloaf?