Weekly Meal Plan
In my post about D and I becoming debt free, I mentioned how I got serious about meal planning and grocery shopping, which helped us cut our grocery bill in half. Before my obsession with meal planning started, I would pick a few things out that I might want to make before going to the store, but I basically just walk into Winco and make up our dinners as I shopped. This resulted in two issues: One: I would end up buying food for about 15 different potential meals and never remember later in the week what I was planning on making and Two: I would buy so much produce and we would never eat it all before it went bad. We were wasting so much money and the amount of food I kept bringing home with no concrete plan was getting ridiculous.
When I realized I needed to cut our grocery bill down, I started going into the store with a plan. I go about meal planning in a pretty laid back way-I never leave it until last minute when I am supposed to be walking out the door to the store. I LOVE to experiment in the kitchen, so I take a whole hour or two browsing pinterest for new ideas and recipes to try. I copy all of the links down in an email to myself and below each link, list every ingredient I need to make that meal. I then go through my whole pantry and fridge and cross off anything I already have so I don’t buy double. (I once bought bbq sauce once a week for a month without realizing we had some already…we now have 5 bottles of sweet baby rays sitting in the pantry!) I do all of my grocery shopping on Tuesday night when WinCo is empty and I can take my time to look at prices and brands.
The most important part of my meal plan is looking ahead on our calendar and planning meals that will work with our schedules. This means slow cooker meals on evenings I work late or one pot meals that I can prep in the morning and refrigerate so that D can just throw it in the oven when he gets home. On days when I have more time to cook, I pick more complicated or complex meals to try out.
Anyway, since I do so much planning already, I figured I would start sharing my meal plans on here! Here is our meal plan from this last week!
Monday:
1. Baked Lemon Tilapia served with
2. Garlic Roasted Potatoes
Tuesday:
3. Slow Cooker Creamy Chicken and Broccoli over Rice
Wednesday:
Left Overs
Thursday:
4. Slow Cooker Cream Cheese Chicken Taquitos
Friday:
Date Night
Saturday:
Grilled Chicken Salad
Sunday:
5. Lasagna Soup
All of these new recipes were amazing-D especially liked the Taquitos and I loved the Creamy Chicken and Broccoli rice bowl. Let me know if you try any of these recipes out!
