{ Meal plan with me - Old recipe collection }

I'm getting ready to menu plan for the next two weeks.  I was looking for inspiration and while cleaning my kitchen cabinets yesterday, came across some of my old recipe collections.

You probably have some of these yourself.  I started collecting them many, many years ago, when Jasmine was still little.  I've always been fascinated by old cookbooks and recipes.

Actually, my greatgrandmother has this cookbook, a really old Portuguese cookbook that I adored.  I had my eye on it for the longest time and really wanted to have it for myself, but she ended up giving it to my Uncle, and when he passed away the book just disappeared along with a lot of his belongings.  (his wife at the time just cut off all communication with our family).

It always stuck with me, because I loved that book so much and it was well taken care of and one of my greatgrandma's prized possessions, so when she gave it away to someone else I felt quite sad.  I can't help but think that if it had been with me, it would still have been here and used and loved.  But, let bygones be bygones.

Here's the book, it was called "ABC da Culinaria by Etelvina Lopes de Almeida.

As I was sitting down to get started, I thought I would bring you along with me and actually show you what I ended up doing with the old recipes.

A lot of these I found at Yard sales or thrift stores. 

And some I bought, or my husband bought for me.  I enjoy these recipes because they're not fancy or require all these gourmet ingredients to produce, tasty, home cooked food.  At the end of the day, whether you work at home or outside the home, you don't want to spend hours trying to fix super complicated meals.

I've pulled out my meal plan book, and I've showed you this before in a previous post about the notebooks I use for meal planning and my budget and bills.

As you can see above that was from the last menu plan.  I always write the menu on one side and the grocery list on the other, it makes it easier when I go grocery shopping because if I ever wonder why I am buying a specific ingredient, I can quickly glance over the menu and see what it's for. 

It's also happened before, that I couldn't find something I needed, and having the menu plan with me, I was able to quickly change the meal, right there at the store.

One thing I don't like about these, is that a lot of them came with no box or folder or anything to put them in, so I had them in tupperware boxes, which is not the best way to keep them and it made it quite difficult to flip through and find what I wanted.

I had these blue dollar store containers, so I popped them all into one and not only do they fit but they make it extremely easy to quickly browse through.

The container now sits on my cookbook shelf and I have easy access to it, when I need to look for a recipe, I pull the container down, find what I need and back it goes.

I found a few recipes that I want to make this meal plan and am quite excited to try those.  There's nothing worth than getting stuck in a rut when it comes to dinners, is there?

I would love to know if you all have some of these recipe collections too or if you use them at all.