By Michael Leppert
Homeschooling families tend to make home the center of life, whether they begin with that intention or not. It seems that once you remove school from your family’s life, the obvious migration is home-centric.
To that end, two sisters have developed a way to help families return to the dinner table for the evening meal by simplifying meal planning and preparation – Build a Menu!
Lisa Holcomb and Karee Blunt are homeschooling moms, of 11 children total! — who began doing research years ago, trying to find a resource like Build a Menu™ to make their lives easier in the meal-planning and execution. Their “failure” to find such a resource led them to create Build a Menu™ for themselves and ultimately, for moms all over the U.S. and the world!
A user pays a subscription of $8 per month, allowing access to the meal-planning, shopping and cooking of a very wide variety of dishes — with recipes being submitted from all over the world, France, Canada, the UK – and an ever-growing list of supermarkets Build a Menu™ samples.
Build A Menu ™ will plan a variety of meals taking advantage of store sales, making it quick and easy for you to choose what your family will enjoy that week, and prepare an itemized grocery shopping list organized by category, ready for you to print and use. With food prices climbing every month, a resource like Build a Menu™ is almost a necessity.
Recipes come from all over. Some are the founders’ family heirlooms, but the demand is too great not to use those from members. Build a Menu™ has a huge database of thousands of recipes.
Besides offering their great services to potentially harried homemakers, Lisa and Karee use Build a Menu™ to also support Orphan Care charities; they donate money to 10 different charities. That is a big reason why they do Build a Menu™. You can read their fascinating back story at the Story Behind section on their website.
Finally, the sisters want to stress the true benefits of Build a Menu™ : 1. Getting the family back to the dinner table; 2. “If you fail the plan, you plan to fail.” If you don’t plan your menu, you won’t have what you need on the table or eat out or similar. The food budget is the highest expense next to the mortgage or rent. Build a Menu™ is a strong budgeting tool. 3. Adoption Care – that is the real, serious drive behind what they do. Please visit their very pleasant-looking website and bring your family back to the table! MjL