I’ve been meaning to make one of these for ages since I saw some similar ideas on Pinterest. We have so many lovely meals that we cook but quite often they were forgotten as we tried new meals.

Every week I already plan my menu before doing the shopping but having to go through all the recipes to get the ingredients etc took forever so I decided to simplify things and create meal cards with all the ingredients listed on the back.

So here is a step by step guide on how to make a simple menu planner:

1. To create meal cards, open a word document and create a table with 4 rows and 2 columns. Then type your meals in one box and the ingredients in the other box. I’ve done 40 meals at the moment and this is probably the thing which takes most time.

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2. Print off the meals onto coloured card. I got a bit technical here and grouped my meals into four categories. Slow cooker meals I printed on pink card, 15 minute meals I printed on blue card, salads are on green card and meals which take a bit longer to prepare are on yellow card. Of course you don’t have to be as picky as me, you can print them off on any type or colour card you like.

3. Now we are lucky in our house as we have a laminator (being married to a teacher has some advantages) so I then cut the cards out, put the ingredients behind the meal card and laminated them. I managed to fit about 5 cards in each A4 laminator sheet so I only used eight of them. If you haven’t got a laminator then they are cheap enough to buy, we got ours from Tesco but you can get them from Amazon for about £12.50 Here. They also come in very handy for making reward charts and laminating kids artwork! But if you don’t want to go to the expense of buying a laminator then you can always just print on both sides of the card or you can buy Transparent printer labels which you could use and just stick to the card.

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4. Now my kitchen has lots of steel and we have no space on the fridge so I decided to buy a magnetic notice board to use for my meal planner. You can of course just use the fridge if you have space but this is the board that I got from Amazon.

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5. Once I’d made the cards, I needed somewhere to store them and with a bit of searching I found this small magnetic basket which is just the right size and was only £5.25

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6. I also found these lovely magnetic days of the week pegs from this website, but there are other types around on eBay or if you’re feeling crafty make your own :)

7. And then it’s just a case of choosing which meals you are having in a week and pegging them to the magnets. Shopping is now a hundred times easier as all the ingredients are listed on the back :)

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So there you have it, this can be really cheap to make if you use the fridge as all you really need are the pegs, magnetic basket and some coloured card :) I’ve attached a pdf document below with my 40 vegetarian meals and ingredients on it below to get you started :)

40 Vegetarian Recipe Cards