Frugal meal planning
Meal plans are your friends. What is a meal plan? I guess the definition of “meal planning” is simply investing a little time in advance (listing out the food you’ll use in a given time period) to save time and money later.
In particular, you’ll save time by not wondering what to make for dinner each evening (while standing in front of an uninspiring open refrigerator); you’ll save time when you shop because you’ll know exactly what you need; you’ll save money by buying only what you need and not wasting money on things that go bad before you use them. Now that we’re all singing the praises of meal plans, let’s get down to nuts and bolts.
There are many approaches to meal planning, but the essence is very straightforward: figure out what you’re going to eat in advance. Like grocery shopping trips, the length of time you’re talking about will vary family to family. We do weekly shopping trips, so we do weekly meal plans. You can get fancy and do your meal planning online (Meals Matter is a great resource for this); you can use a printed form to help (Organized Home has some nice tools for this—free, of course!); or you can take the low-tech method (which I usually do) and just grab a piece of paper, list out the days and potential meals, and then decide which ones you’re going to make.
No matter what tools you use for your planning, the next step is to decide what you’re actually going to make. For me, it works best to do mostly tried-and-true meals I know my family likes. I love browsing through Recipezaar and finding new and attractively photographed dishes; however, for my own sanity’s sake, I find that one or two new recipes is all I should attempt in a week (there are a lot of recipes in line for this “honor”).
Many times I’ll just put “fend for yourself”. In my house, we do almost all lunches that way, and frequently dinner as well. Breakfasts around here are usually pancakes, fruit syrup, and some sort of soy protein on the side, so that’s easy to plan. Dinners take a little more thought, but the loss leaders can often inspire you! The key here is to look at your meal plan as a whole and aim for balance—balance of nutrition and balance of cost. Laying it out makes it easier to see if you’re setting yourself up for a lot of expensive evenings, or if your family’s nutritional needs will be met.
Once you’ve written down the meal components, it’s just a matter of making a shopping list. Having the meal plan will make that task pretty easy; we’ll talk about that tomorrow!
This post is part of the “Smart grocery shopping” series.
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