Menu Planning Board Part 2

This is just a little sneek peek of what I am working on. It is just a screen shot of some designing I am doing to create the whole board.

I am diving in head first into this project. I am really excited to be done with the planning, drawing, and laying out of this project and moving on with the "coming to pass" (which is not in this post-so sorry!). If you didn't see the inspiration of this menu project, you can read here about it. This post is the busy part of this menu board. It might even be considered the boring part. This is where the effort comes in... the gathering of information.

I wanted to take the inspiration of having a binder of 30 meals, and add in a few recipes of desserts, side dishes, and salads accompanied by some holiday treats. I do not want a huge gigantic binder as I am looking to downsize the space being used now!


Images Source

So I am going to be using the half size binder (5.5" x 8.5"), except mine is all white. I found mine at Wal-Mart, for the best price of about $4. I also purchased the mini tab dividers ($3), and the mini pocket folders ($3). I needed a place to put those magazine cut outs! (I also received this great tip from Clutter Diet that you can find here, should you be more the electronic type.)

So I designed a recipe card in Illustrator and converted it to a PDF with entry fields. There are 2 recipes cards per 8.5" x 11" page so I can cut them in half. You Need to download this font, otherwise your computer will use whatever it wants. I filled the cards in, and saved it with different extensions (2, 3, 4 so I could have digital copies...) and printed them, and re-filled them in again, saved them, printed again.... cause I wanted all the Main Dish recipes on one color, the salads on another, etc. After laminating, I cut them in half and adjusted my 3 hole punch to line up with the mini binder (yes, they are adjustable in case you have never noticed that :)

 Because this was also a project for my Craft Group, the file that has the recipe cards has 8 different colors. People need choices! There are 8 pages, each page has 2 cards, being a different color. I hope that it is not overwhelming, so here you go. If you want all your cards one color and want to save them (instead of the type-print-delete option) fill in the one color of card and "save as"  with a 1, 2, 3 etc.(Ex. the name of the doc is Recipe Template 2... save as Recipe Template 2.1 and so on)

**TIP: I know a lot of people have a hard time using downloaded PDF files. Try opening Adobe FIRST, then opening the file. My computer just views downloaded PDF files in my picture viewer! So I have to open the Adobe program first.**

Next on the must have is a Master Ingredient List. I find this idea completely fabulous! It is a spreadsheet list with all 30 of your recipes across the top, and the ingredients needed for each recipe listed down the side.  Since these are recipes your whole family loves, you know to always be on the lookout for a great buy and to always have them in stock. Here in UT we have a lot of case lot sales, where you can buy cans of condensed soup per say in cases. This list makes that easier. I have made one up in Excel. When you print it, it will be larger than the 5.5" x 8.5" but no worries. I will show you what I did. In this same document on Sheet 2 I have a second list for soups, because here in UT we have four seasons, and soup doesn't exactly go with triple digit heat waves.

So, what you do is fill in the list like a chart. If I know how many packages or pounds of something I need per recipe, I used a number. If I knew I just needed it like a condiment, I put an "X".

So if you are doing this project, I should keep you busy for a while until I get to the next step. Because there is more awesomeness coming!