Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen: A Simple Way to Keep up With a Menu

No series about the kitchen would be complete without touching on the menu. Making a menu each week or even month saves time, money, sanity, and usually ends up in everyone eating much, much healthier. There are a lot of menu planner systems online that you have to pay for, but I found a pretty easy way to do it myself.

I used to sit at my kitchen table once a month and spend hours pouring over cookbooks, writing down menu plans, and then making up shopping lists of what I'd need each week. Not. Fun.

Then when I became the food writer for Knoxville Examiner, I did a lot of looking at food online. I would save ideas and recipes I found in my free Evernote account. Soon it was bursting at the seams. When would I make them all?

I decided that I would plot each saved recipe on a calendar so that I actually would one day make these things. 

So I open my iCal program (calendar program for Macs) and quickly realize that appointment entries have a space for a url! I copied the url for my first saved recipe in my web browser, then flipped to my iCal program, put the recipe name on my calendar on a day I think I can make it, and plugged the url into the entry. I continued to do this until my "Recipes to Save" folder was used up. 

Then I thought: hmmm . . . this is nice, but I really need to take a look at what I have plugged into my calendar now and rearrange it so that when I have a dinner with chicken one night, for example, I have something for lunch with chicken in it on the next day. You know, so I can plan economically. Who has time to redo all of those entries? Duh, Tanya. I decided to try to drag an entry onto another day. It worked! Oh baby. Just drag those recipes all around so easily! I can plug recipes right into my calendar, plug in the url so I can click on it and know what to do when I am ready to cook it, and even drag entries around if I miss something or want to rearrange. The dragging is really great because let's face it: life is unpredictable.

Oh and iCal has an entire sidebar next to the calendar for notes. I can use that to type in needed ingredients as I go, separating by week if I grocery shop weekly, and then I even have a shopping list ready to go!

iCal is the calendar program that comes with Macs. I checked to see if it would work for non-Mac users, like the Mac web browser does. Nope. But I did find a program created to basically be an iCal for windows. It is called MonoCalendar if you want to check it out. 

One last thing: You can color-code types of entries in iCal. For example, all of my recipe entries are in red, kids' appointments are in blue, work-related entries are in green. Also you can turn types of entries on or off. So if I just want to see my recipes on my calendar, I can turn off the viewing for the kids and work entries. This is a fabulous system for meal planning!

So this is one easy menu-planning idea; do you have any to share?

This post is part of the Spring Spruce Up series. Today is the last Spruce Up post but stick around tomorrow because we will have a link-up so you can add your own Spruce Up ideas or experiences! And if you missed the past two days, check out:

Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen: Food Storage

Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen: Decluttering

And for now, go check out other rooms of the house & outside at more participating blogs!:

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling

Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen: Decluttering

Having a simple, non-cluttered kitchen is inviting and makes you feel good to be in there. It also makes it easier to find things, use things, and prepare meals!

When we first moved into this house and found out that it had no food pantry and only 10 cabinets in which to store everything, including food, we bought this black wire shelving unit to keep things on. Its what I saw in neighbors' homes who have similar kitchen predicaments.

At first I was so happy to have a place to store things that I thought it was great. But after the months started going by, I felt more and more cluttered with being able to see all of that "stuff". I was determined to make it all go away somehow.

First, I took an honest look at how often I use things that I keep in easy reach. For example, I have a big bulky bread maker that I used to keep out because I "really should make bread more often". But I never did! So I stored that sucker high in the top of one of my larger cabinets. So I did an inventory and stored what I could out of the way and behind cabinet doors.

Second, I rearranged the way that I store food so that I didn't need the shelving unit for food storage.

Third, I truly did need some type of extra storage, so I gave up the armoire that I used for a television in my bedroom (which I don't really need), to use in the kitchen. Its the perfect microwave stand and I use the upper shelf for my cookbooks. In the bottom cabinets, I have some appliances that had no where else to go, as well as a bucket filled with handy items such as: aluminum foil, ziplock bags, and packs of light bulbs.

The armoire is in the same corner where the shelving unit was - what a difference!

Armoires, china cabinets, and hutches are great for extra storage in the kitchen. I used to think that these pieces of furniture were just too bulky for a kitchen, especially a small one. But giving up a little space to a beautiful piece of furniture rather than having clutter everywhere is a great trade-off! (And yes, that shelving unit took up a huge amount of space anyway!)



Be sure to check out yesterday's Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen if you missed it, and come back tomorrow for another one! Then on Thursday, we'll have a link-up where you can put your own Spring Spruce Up tips, ideas, or experiences.

This post is part of the Spring Spruce Up series. Check out other rooms of the home at participating blogs!: 

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling

Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen: Food Storage

I have a fairly small kitchen, but I sure do spend a lot of time in there. I do not have a food pantry, and I have a total of just 10 cabinets for everything I need to store, including food. So in the years of living here I have gotten more and more efficient at where to keep everything.

One thing that really helps is to group like items together. Start by thinking about what you do a lot of in the kitchen, and where you do it. Then group like items together, and store them nearest where you will be using them. 

The above is my baking cabinet. I do a lot of baking, and everything I need is in this one cabinet. All of the flours and sugars are in there. On the bottom shelf is containers that I can just grab and pull out to find what I need. From the left: the taller blue box is filled with bags of nuts and dried fruit, the smaller blue box is my "essentials": baking soda and powder, vanilla, two other extracts I use often, and yeast, then the glass bowl is filled with the "goodies": chocolate chips, baking chocolates, marshmallows, and powdered sugar. The cabinet is right across from my island, where I do all of my rolling out, cutting out, mixing, etc. for baking.

Another thing I do often in the kitchen is make chinese food. So right above my stove, because that's where I use it, is my "chinese section" in the cabinet. It contains the above pull-out bowl with chinese sauces, vinegar, and wine, as well as canned veggies, noodles, wrappers, etc.

Likewise, in the cabinet above my coffee maker is my ground coffee, a little bag of sugar, a jar of flavored syrup, and my coffee mugs. Easy peasy to stand in one spot and make coffee each day, with everything I need.

The second thing that really helps is having a place to store snacks without taking up a lot of room. The above is our "snack basket". It is a very large basket that sits on the island shelf and is filled with nuts & seeds, snack bars, crackers, cookies, chips, packets of applesauce, little cans of fruit, and even ramen noodle packets. It looks pretty since its in a nice basket, and now I don't have to find lots of space for all of these items. The added bonus is that when the kids come and tell me they are hungry, all I have to say is, "Look in the snack basket!"

Speaking of that pretty storage basket, the third thing that can help is to store your food right out in the open, but in a pretty way. For example, when I buy popcorn kernals, grains, dried soups, beans, or rice, I pour them out of the box or bag that they came in and into a canning jar. Then I arrange the jars somewhere nice. They are easy to grab and go when I am ready to cook with them, and I have somewhere to keep them without taking up precious cabinet space!

That's it for today's Spring Spruce Up in the Kitchen, but stick around! We've got two more days of kitchen organizing tips and ideas, as well as a link-up on Thursday, where you can link up your own Spring Spruce Up ideas for any room in your home!

This post is part of the Spring Spruce Up series. Check out other rooms of the home at participating blogs!: 

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling

Organizing the Kitchen

Spring Spruce Up starts Monday, and I am participating! For three days I'll be posting about organizing the kitchen. Then there will be a link-up on Thursday, so you can add your own Sprucing Up posts!

Check out more participating blogs to find great ideas for all of the rooms of your home!

Sprucing Up the Laundry Room | Mama’s Laundry Talk
Sprucing Up the School Room | Homegrown Mom
Sprucing Up the Craft Room | Many Little Blessings
Sprucing Up the Bathroom | Feels Like Home
Sprucing Up the Playroom | …Life’s About a Dream
Sprucing Up the Garage/Storage Space | A Slob Comes Clean
Sprucing Up the Master Bedroom | Raising Arrows
Sprucing Up Your Homeschool | Jimmie’s Collage
Sprucing Up the Kitchen | So Happy Together
Sprucing Up the Garden | An Oregon Cottage
Sprucing Up the Backyard | Successful Homeschooling