My rotating menu.

15 years ago I learned out of neccessity that I needed to come up with a weekly menu for dinnertimes. The boys were small at the time and we were living in Barbados. Grocery shopping was very challenging as access to food products was very limited. Coming up with a menu with recipes that called for common ingredients was how I survived. By the time we moved back to Canada, I had a 6-week rotating menu with recipes that the boys would eat.

After moving back I didn't want to fall back into old habbits of processed foods, pre-made cook-from-fozen kind of meals, so I continued on with the menu idea. It worked - for the most part ... but I was starting to find it a chore to dig out the recipes (yes, I still cook from the recipies) everytime I needed to go grocery shopping or cook.

Then, one day, two years ago, I came across this idea on the internet ... and I tweaked it a little to fit my purposes.

It's a photo box that contains little mini photo albums inside. Instead of photos in the slots, I stamped words on 4x6 cards and inserted them.

Inside I have labelled the spines of the four mini albums. Week 1,2,and 3; Week 4, 5, and 6; Side dishes and desserts; and Holidays and company.

Then I labelled each page in the mini albums with the days of the week with a label maker. I printed off all the recipies and inserted them in the albums.

The advantage to this system is that I no longer need to pull out my recipe books on a daily basis and I can move the recipies around if they aren't working where they are in the rotation. It also allows me to swap in new recipies and take out old ones when we get bored of them. Making up my grocery list became a lot faster.

I can just leave the box sitting on my kitchen counter. It's convenient, and it looks great.

If you're wondering where I got the idea from CHECK HERE. She created a recipe box. I took the idea a little farther to work for me and made it a menu box.

Now I'm hungry!