Guest post by Clair Boone
This is part 3 of Clair’s series, In the Land of No Double Coupons. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
4. Plan a Menu
It’s 5:00 p.m. and your husband is due home in half an hour. The kids are going crazy, the baby is crying and you have spent the day cleaning up toys. Just when you think things can’t get worse you realize you have no dinner planned.
Although you could convince your husband to eat cereal or frozen pizza, is that what you want? Or what you want the kids to eat? With the way our lives are nowadays, we run around like headless chickens and try to fit in eating healthy.
If you want to eat healthy and live frugally there’s only one thing to it — you’re gonna have to start meal planning.
Meal Planning Defined
According to the Meal Planning Mommies, meal planning is “creating a flexible, livable schedule of family meals.”
Meal planning is:
- Meant to take the stress out of dinner time and put the fun back in cooking family meals.
- Going to help you plan a variety of healthier, cost-efficient meals based on your family’s needs.
- Going to save you MONEY and TIME.
- Individual to your family.
Meal planning does not have to be:
- A rigid calendar of meals.
- Meals that don’t suit your family’s tastes/lifestyle.
- Costly.
- Time consuming.
- Stressful.
My Meal Plan
My meal plan is really simple. At the beginning of each week or sometimes every couple of weeks, I look at what’s already in the stockpile. My stockpile contains items I got for free, cheap or things that I already have on hand.
If we only have chicken in the freezer then I’m going to get creative. If I’ve got a variety then we’re in luck.
Once the meal plan is written using those ingredients, I write a list for the things I need to actually make those random ingredients into meals and then I run out to the store. Not before. Running into the store without a list will end up in copious amount of impulse buying, regretful decisions and the grocery budget up. I know it and I’m guilty.
So make a list and don’t back out.
Sometimes You Just Need to Improvise
A few weeks ago we were having friends over for dinner and I decided I was making chili.
As it was time for a grocery shop anyway, I wrote a list of everything we needed that week. We had ground beef around (hence my decision to make chili) and so I knew I needed chili seasoning. I went out, came home and started to cook.
About two minutes into it I realized I was missing a key ingredient: tomatoes! My friends were arriving in half an hour, I didn’t want to go back to the store and risk impulse buying so I can now attest to the fact that tomato sauce, tomato ketchup and a dollop of BBQ sauce makes a great chili!
In other words, if you forgot it at the store, improvise.
Stay tuned for Part 4 tomorrow…
She bought diapers for 20 cents a pack prompting her friends to ask her to start www.mummydeals.org to teach others how to save money. She loves to use her couponing powers to buy things and donate them. Originally from England, Clair Boone is wife to an amazing man, Mum to a toddler and lives near Chicago.
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