nesting?

I think I might be "nesting." This morning I dragged Mike to Costco (note to self: in the future, Costco should be avoided like the plague on Saturday mornings!) to stock up on all the stuff that we generally only buy once or twice a year - like packages of 20 boxes of Kleenex and 3# of pine nuts. When we got home, putting all this away suddenly triggered a kitchen cleaning binge.

First I reorganized our refrigerator and freezer. This was no mean feat.

Doing so led me to move a bunch of food to the basement freezer in order to make more space upstairs. In a moment of genius, I decided to make a list of all the food I had moved, in the hopes that we wouldn't then forget about it. (Also I hoped this would encourage me to continue to stock up for once Baby arrives!)

Then I reorganized our messiest cabinet. (Note the new labels on the shelves, so neither Mike nor I can "forget" to keep it organized.) This was a surprisingly daunting task that actually took a lot of effort.

Then I started organizing the pictures for Baby's room. (But that's still a work in progress, so I'll show you the finished product later.)

Finally, I want to show off the new menu board I created in the last couple weeks - I think this was my first foray into nesting! Here was the original inspiration I found on Pinterest:

I liked the idea of it, but I wanted to tailor it to my style a little bit. Like, make it less scrapbook-y.
So here's my version: 

I finally finished it on Friday night, so I got to try it out this morning before we went to the grocery store. It made making my grocery list SO MUCH EASIER. (Yes, I had to shout that! I love it!)

I laminated all the recipes that I wish we would make on a regular basis - I say "wish we would make" our usual pre-grocer routine used to go something like this:

 What do you want for dinner this week?

I don't know, what do you want?
 
I don't know. Nothing sounds good. Maybe XXX?

I guess.


And then we'd eat XXX (tacos, or spaghetti, or sandwiches, or whatever) every night for weeks on end, simply because we were too lazy to think of anything new.

Clearly that system wasn't working.

So now we have all our favorite meals laminated on cards! The front of the card has the recipe title to post on the menu board...

...and the back of the card has the main ingredients (anything other than butter, flour, or other staples that we normally keep in the house).

And notice how they're all color-coded? White is meals that take an hour or less (usually much less), so they're easy for weeknight dinners. Yellow is meals that require some prep work (like a casserole that needs to be assembled) but can then be finalized in less than an hour. Red is meals that require significant prep work and are therefore reserved for weekends and special occasions (like beef burgundy or french onion soup). And then there is one orange card for leftovers that we can reuse week after week.

Oh, and I didn't take a picture of it, but I put a key on the back of the board that has an alphabetical listing of every single recipe and tells where the recipe comes from (my recipe binder vs. my America's Test Kitchen cookbook, etc.).

Mike and I had the easiest time ever this morning when we tried to generate our list of meals for the week. This time it went something like this:

Ooh! Risotto! We haven't had that in a long time.

Let's also have this shrimp curry dish. Remember how good that was the one time we made it and planned to keep it in our menu rotation?!?

Etc. 

So much more pleasant than our past menu-planning dialogue! And creating the grocery list for the cards we selected was super easy - no having to track down the recipe from the appropriate cookbook, making 20 trips from the dining room table (where I generally make the list) to the kitchen (where I check on whether we have certain ingredients) and back to the bookshelf (where I'd get the next cookbook off the shelf). This was easy peasy.

Yep, I think it's pretty clear that I'm proud of my menu board, aka my first official nesting project!