Planning the menu

Tomorrow is supposed to be my grocery shopping day no matter what. Well, ya, that's funny because tomorrow is going to be a fun shopping day for me! I'm going to hit a few after Christmas sales as well as return some items and go to a few thrift stores.

Grocery shopping will wait until Friday when I can make a plan. Well, honestly I have been planning all week long. Whenever I find something I want to make I write it down. I still need to look in my pantry and see what's available for other meals. I see chicken on sale this week and london broil so I see those in our future as well.

On the front of my fridge I have a chalkboard that lists the meals that we're going to have. For some reason I panic when I forget I have a plan. Every day I would try to remember what we were having for dinner that night. I have it in my binder, but I'd have to walk CLEAR across the kitchen to get it (yes, it's only 10 steps!). When it's right in front of my face I feel much better. It helps me to remember what items must be taken out of the freezer as well.

Tomorrow I'll have my plan in place and Friday I'll do the grocery shopping. So far this month, I've spent $145.00. I get $120 tomorrow so I'll see how far I can stretch it!

Frugal Menu Plan Monday 1/11 - 1/16

Last night I made fancy quesadillas and they were amazing! Here's the plan for the rest of the week:

1. Husband cooks
2. Cajun red beans and rice with smoked sausages
3. Split pea and ham soup
4. Broccoli and ham quiche here's the crust recipe and here is the quiche recipe (I add 5 eggs because we don't usually like the texture of quiche). My husband likes this a lot and he's not usually a quiche lover.
5. Cheesy Rice and Beef
6. Shrimp (leftover from Christmas) in a cream sauce
7. ??? Depends on if I go to the store or not. We'll either have pepperoni pizza or veggie Spaghetti if chicken isn't on sale.

Find other menu plans at Orgjunkie.

Grocery Shopping every other week

Yeah, this is working well so far! I've spent money on food on Jan 4, 5, 6, 7. Crazy!

• Jan 4 Lueders $10.90
• Jan 5 Robb's $10.75
• Jan 6 Walmart $5.26
• Jan 7 Lueders $19.07
• Jan 7 Safeway $25.52
• Total spent in January $71.50

Now, in my defense, I haven't been real grocery shopping (meaning spent a lot of money on food) since Dec 22nd. I had my husband buy milk at Walmart because I was worried about the weather...we really didn't need it at the time.

Yesterday I posted my big grand plan for two weeks. It took me hours to finish it (my kids and husband were home yesterday so I get interrupted a lot). About 5 minutes after I finished it my husband told me that he was going to a meeting in Rapid City. I need to go to Sam's Club there so I figured instead of making two trips to Rapid I'd ride along and save the gas money.

So my beloved plan went out the window. This morning I picked up a few of the great loss leaders at Lueders and Safeway. We're heading out to Sam's Club pretty soon.

I'm not sure what my new plan is!

2 Week Menu Plan

Earlier this week I looked in my pantry for 12 dinners I could serve for the next 2 week. My husband cooks on Sundays so I don't have to worry about those. That man is magical and can make something from nothing and it tastes awesome!

Today when the ads came out I added one more thing since hamburger was finally on sale. Here's the two week menu plan:

1. Husband
2. Husband
3. Cajun red beans and rice with smoked sausages
4. Black beans and rice over tortilla chips
5. Split pea and ham soup
6. Black Bean soup
7. Spaghetti with Italian sausage
8. Manicotti (made at the same time as the spaghetti and frozen for the following week
9. Monterrey Chicken Quesadillas (these sound awesome!)
10. Shrimp in a cream sauce (can't remember what it's called - shrimp is leftover from Christmas)
11. Broccoli and ham quiche
12. Buffalo chicken spaghetti
13. Cheesy Beef & Rice (new recipe to try)
14. Greek Cinnamon Stewed Chicken (my sister said this was good)

I'm still working on what veggies we're going to have with dinner. I plan a trip to Sam's Club next Wednesday so I'll have a lot of green beans and peas.

Breakfast will be:

• Mondays: pancakes or waffles
• Tuesdays: steel cut oats
• Wednesdays: new recipe
• Thursdays: leftovers
• Fridays: scrambled eggs
• weekends are FFYS (fend for yourself)

Pantry

1/4/2010
Lueders trip - 1 bag oranges, 2 boxes saltines, 8 cans mushrooms and 12 medium eggs $10.90
Using the pantry principle:
My definition of our pantry is "anything that contains stockpiled items." I don't stockpile things for the fun of it or because I believe I need to have a years supply of anything. I stockpile things simply to save time and money.
For example, today when I bought saltines I put one in my cupboard and one in my "pantry." When we eat all of the saltines that are in my cupboard then I'll grab this box of saltines from the pantry instead of paying full price.
Saltines are one of a few things that I stockpile. I know that we don't use that many, but they are really convenient for me to have on hand. I know that about every 6 weeks they go on sale for $1.00. This saves me $.35.
Who cares about $.35? Why sweat the small stuff, it's not a big deal. Let's say that I "only" save $.35 on 10 items that I buy every week. That's $3.50 per week, over the course of a year $182. I've earned TAX-FREE $182 in my job as a homemaker. In order to save that $182 I have spent a bit of time. I couldn't even guess how much time, maybe 5 minutes to look at the ad?
The pantry principle can work for anyone!

Find more frugal ideas over at Frugal Fridays at Life as a Mom!

I lied...

Gee - first a confession and now I lied, aren't I a good influence?!?

I thought I would just wing it until Thursday, but I haven't done a big grocery shop for almost two weeks and I'm getting low on eggs and I'm out of fresh fruit. We have enough canned fruit, but we only have a few veggies. I didn't make it to Sam's Club last month to pick up a big bag of veggies and we ran out.

Tomorrow I plan to head to the store to get a few things: eggs, oranges, bananas, saltine crackers (for the pantry) and canned mushrooms (for the pantry because they are at my stock up price).

I will still need to go to the stores on Thursday after I check to see what is in my pantry (fridge, freezer, cupboards). Wednesday night it's supposed to snow and get down to -17 then on Thursday the high temp is supposed to be a whopping 2 so it should be fun! I honestly don't know that I'll make it out on Thursday, Friday is going to be much warmer at 9!!! Maybe I'll wait until then.

For dinner we'll be having:

1. split pea soup
2. broccoli quiche w/ fruit
3. homemade (well, husband made) mac & cheese with ???
4. red beans and rice w/ sausage
5. leftover surprise - this is my bucket of "stuff" from the freezer and I'll make a white sauce to mix with what's in the bucket. My plan is to put baked potatoes on the bottom, the "stuff" next and then a cornflake topping. Sounds absolutely disgusting, but it's one of my favorite meals.

** just to gross people out further the "stuff" is just random leftovers from dinners, ie. a spoon full of corn, beans, rice, etc. A lot of people will make soup from this, but I've had better luck making casseroles.

I plan to have my two week plan posted on Thursday.

Check out more meal planning ideas at Orgjunkie.com!

Confession!

I've been on vacation the past few week, which means that I haven't been doing any of the planning and cooking that I normally do. I didn't realize how busy I had been until I stopped doing everything. Obviously I needed a little break, but I'm totally refreshed and ready to go!

I knew when I sent my husband to Walmart last night to pick up some fried chicken that I needed to get back into my routines.

This morning I pulled out some homemade turkey soup from the freezer that we'll have for dinner. It's going to be full of vegies and we'll have a spinach salad as well. Your freezer is your friend!

Next week I will get back to my normal menu and grocery planning. Tomorrow I'll post what I plan fix until Thursday when I will do a major grocery shopping trip for two weeks. Later this week I'll post my two week plan. I have several recipes that I've been wanting to try as well as my usual beans and rice and soups that I plan to cook.

I have been working behind the scenes on my blog so if it doesn't work, please be patient with this novice!