I’ve explained in an earlier post that we are Simplifying Life in 2013 and part of that is making sure that we are budgeting and sticking with it. We pulled up Mint.com earlier in the month and realized that we had spent an astronomical and embarrassing amount of money on food and eating out. This had never been a huge issue before but with balancing work and parenthood we have sort of been running by the seat of our pants just trying to get through dinner and bedtime routine at night and trying to catch our breath on weekend.
We decided, to truly get a handle on the food budget we needed to change a few things. First, cut out the 500 individual trips to the grocery store a week. Second, start planning the week’s meals and lastly, get a handle on the prep. At this point we have some of these things in place. We are far from that now but we are working on it. For example, here is what a week’s worth of meal planning looks like. With everything written out, it’s much easier to see what we need and what can be used in each meal, what can be used in multiple meals.
For example, with Monday‘s sausage and pepper and onion meal we always have extra sausage and most of the time extra peppers and onions. By chopping the extras, I can use the green peppers in Wednesdays pasta dish and the onions in my Crock Pot minestrone on Friday. I can also take the extra sausage from Monday and buy a full pound of shrimp for Wednesdays pasta and use the excess for an easy Jambalaya recipe on Thursday. The goal is to have as little waste as possible and as many meals with the least amount of spend. I also try to decide what will freeze well and mark what needs to be frozen if we find good sales on certain food.
I’ve also been experimenting, which has proved great and disastrous results…apologies to my poor family for the disasters…on what meals are healthy, tasty and QUICK week day meals. I’ll have those recipes up over the next few weeks. I’ve also set aside some great Crock Pot recipes that I’ve made some tweeks to perfect and….wait for it… Crock Pot meals that can be 100% frozen and just thrown in with remarkably little morning prep. I was a little hesitant about throwing frozen meat or chicken in but I have to admit, it comes out great.
Coming Soon…weekday, almost completely homemade, chicken pot pie. This was an amazing accident
