Making a Menu Board

Making a Menu Board (and all the recipe cards) has been a life-changer in planning and implementing our meals for the week. I found some great ideas on-line and meshed my favorites together to come up with mine.

I have a different box for each day of the week. I typed up all of our favorite recipes onto little cards. The front has the name of the recipe and the back has the full recipe, serving size, and the source. I then sorted them into 7 categories so each day of the week has a different category assigned to it. For now, this is the best way to menu-plan for our family. I was getting overwhelmed with going through tons of recipes to pick out my meals for the week and now I can just sit down for a few minutes on Sunday evening and go through a themed box for each night. I pick out my meals and then flip the cards over to write my grocery list. I'm sure these categories will change as our tastes change, but for now we have 
- Mondays: Mexican 
- Tuesdays: T-Rex (our meat dish of the week)
- Wednesdays: Veggie or Pumpkin or Quinoa Burgers and/or Soup
- Thursdays: Asian, noodles
- Fridays: Homemade Pizza Night
- Saturdays: Date Night
- Sundays: Breakfast for Dinner


These were the steps I took to make the actual board:

First, cut out your board from a sturdy box. Pick out your fabric. I chose one fabric to cover my board and a different fabric for my daily boxes. Choose the boxes that you'll use for your days. I used old conversation hearts' boxes from Valentine's Day (the one that come 12 to a pack so they're smaller than the standard version). For my mother-in-law, we found similar ones at Easter time that had chewy eggs inside them. Then you'll just need a hot glue gun, scissors, mini clothespins and labels (I printed mine on a label maker, but handwritten would work just great too). 

Glue the fabric tightly to the board

Arrange your boxes in the order that you'd like

Wrap the boxes in fabric and glue it down

Once all your boxes are wrapped, (make sure to leave the opening of the box unwrapped so that they can hold the recipe cards) arrange them on the board and then glue them down. Personalize the board in any other ways to make it work best for you. I labeled the clothespins with the days of the week, put our family name on the top, and attached a bow to hang it to my pantry door and added a sharpie and dry-erase maker.