For new moms, the search for quick and easy meals can be a stressful process.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Start a collection of recipes and meal ideas that your family enjoyed and have minimal prep and cooking time.
2. Be sure to include great leftover ideas. For example, if you have a favorite recipe that involves cooking an entire ham, yet using only a portion of it, plan for a follow-up meal, such as ham pot pie. You'll use the remainder of your ham, and save valuable time since it's already cooked.
3. Organize the recipes into groups with like ingredients, so you can make double use of what you're spending your money on at the grocery store.
4. You can group recipes and meal ideas in groups of three or four, enough for a week of meals, or even two weeks of meals. Depending on your personal frequency of grocery shopping, you can choose what works best for you.
5. Prepare a grocery list for the items you'll need for each group of recipes. Type it and save it with a list of the recipes at the top, so you can print it off and run when you want to use it again.
6. Prepare a binder with your recipe groups and a copy of your shopping list.

Over time, you'll develop a large collection of ready-to-go recipes and grocery shopping lists.

You can browse through your binder and select a few groups of recipes that you want to use for the coming week or two, and print out copies of your lists to take to the grocery store. The only extra work you'll need to do is to browse your lists if you're using multiple lists and combine like ingredients together – a small task compared to choosing recipes and creating a brand new list each time!

Image Copyright Angela Stringfellow