It was time to do meal planning and prepping again this weekend. This is month three of the "save money and eat better by planning out the full month's dinners" plan. I'm happy to report that I'm becoming more efficient, and we're starting to figure out which recipes we like.
Our October/November menu is at the end of the post, in case you're curious.
So, how does it work for us? I do the whole thing in one weekend. After the kids are in bed on Friday night, I search for recipes and survey the fridge to figure out a plan. I make a spreadsheet with the dates, planned meals, links to the recipes, and any ingredients I need to buy. I follow a few loose rules:
- Mondays are breakfast for dinner (BFD) days. I don't usually plan to buy anything special/extra for these meals. We eat eggs, pancakes, fruit, etc. - things I can make with regular staples.
- Tuesdays are Crock Pot days. I'm so glad it's getting cooler and we can have lots of delicious soups! I'm learning to be careful about crock pot recipes because they need a good deal of moisture. Soups are great.
- I label a few dinners as "leftovers night" and we eat what we have on hand. I've gotten better about planning these leftovers nights around nights when I know the meal in the previous day or so will give us more than we need.
- I choose dates and label a few (and I try to limit it to two per month) "out to dinner" nights. I try to make these happen only when necessary, or for a special occasion. For example, this month Evelyn has a Halloween dance performance on the 29th at a local mall, and it just makes sense to grab dinner somewhere nearby after that.
- I try to have at least one vegetarian dinner a week (much to Jonathan's dismay).
Once the plan is set and I have grocery lists (I usually need to visit Harris Teeter and Costco - did you know that chicken breasts are way cheaper at the fresh meat counter at HT than they are anywhere else?), which usually takes forevvvvver, I pass out. Saturday morning, we go shopping. This week Evelyn was my shopping companion.
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| Entertaining herself in Costco. |
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| Eating a cookie while waiting on our delicious Costco pizza. Seriously, yum. |
By the time we get home and unload, it's usually lunchtime and then the kids go down for naps. Jonathan is on child duty while I start the work. There is never enough counter space.
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| It starts... |
I usually prep recipes according to meat. Beef, poultry, pork, seafood... it makes it easier to do things like brown a whole bunch of hamburger with chopped onion and then divide it to add/season/etc. as needed for various recipes.
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| The kids don't love it when mom's busy cooking all day and can't read or play. |
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| You can never have too many black beans, diced tomatoes, or cans of tomato sauce. Never. |
I don't worry too much about cleaning up after myself. I keep things clean, I wash my hands all the time, and I scrub the cutting boards, but otherwise I let things pile up. It keeps the process going.
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| Things get messy fast. |
I store most things in freezer ziplock bags. I also usually have a few meals a month that go in those disposable foil trays that you can get for like 50 cents at the store (e.g., lasagna, shrimp scampi).
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| I double or triple recipes often, and I date bags with the date we're scheduled to eat them. Bags without dates are extra meals. |
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| Crock Pot chicken dishes are usually the easiest because you don't have to pre-cook the meat at all. Just toss everything in a bag and when you're ready to eat, defrost and then dump it in the crock pot. |
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| More mess. |
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| And done! |
OCTOBER MENU:
12: Costco Pizza (cooking day!)
13: Martha's big batch vegetable soup
14: BFD: Biscuits and Gravy
15: Crock Pot: Chili
16: Leftovers
17: Firecracker Salmon (I'm trying to get more seafood on the menu!)
18: Crock Pot: baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese (I just bake the potatoes in the crock pot and we add broc and cheese later
19: Spaghetti and meatballs (we use Costco's frozen meatballs - not health food but definitely yummy and a bag has lasted us over 3 months now - I don't freeze anything for this meal)
20: Quinoa sloppy joes
21: BFD: eggs
22: Leftovers
23: Chicken nuggets (we have lots left over from a huge batch I made last month - we LOVE these and they're so easy because you freeze them raw)
24: Crock Pot: taco soup
25: Shrimp Scampi (I used just 1 bag of shrimp for 3 trays and cut the butter amount way down)
26: Crock Pot: cranberry chicken
27: Leftovers
28: BFD: Pancakes
29: Out to eat (Evelyn's dance show)
30: Crock Pot: Cilantro Lime Chicken
31: PB&J (Halloween)
1: Crock Pot: pot roast
2: Leftovers
3: Fish Sticks (again just a bag from Costco - though one of these days I'll make my own)
4: BFD: French Toast
5: Crock Pot: beef and broccoli
And then it'll be the first weekend in November, so I can do it again!
This month we had the following meals as extras (from me doubling or tripling the recipes above - or just from some of those recipes making way more than we need for one dinner): vegetable soup with beef, shrimp scampi, shrimp scampi, beef stroganoff (actually made this extra because we had tons of leftover stew beef), chili, quinoa sloppy joes.
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