Meal Planning

I had posted on my other blog (which I still can't access!!) about meal planning and thought I'd post about it again since I lost my post. I thought I'd include some info about freezing and the things I make myself.  We are 2 adults, and a toddler so your amounts may be way different than ours. Sometimes my husband takes leftovers for work, or we make other meals from them or freeze for later use.

First off, let me say I am not always on top of my meal planning/budget. There are times when we just don't feel like sitting down and making a plan, or looking through the cabinets/freezer to find out what we already have. And our budget suffers from it. Meal planning really does save money. It also eliminates the "What's for dinner?" conversation. I'm also able to plan meals based on our budget. Some pay days, we are able to splurge at the grocery, sometimes we have to really budget carefully.


I keep a master list of our meals, which I'm always adding to (We try to incorporate at least 2 new recipes a month). It makes planning going much faster have a place to start from. We just sit down with our list and pick however many we need for that plan.

I used this printable

Some meals end up getting dropped because we just don't feel like eating it. Because we get paid every 2 weeks, we try to plan for at least 2 weeks. If we know we can budget more for groceries, sometimes we will plan or at least shop for a month. We pretty much buy the same things, just in bigger amounts. We don't plan a specific meal for specific days (with the exception of things that need my husbands attention ie : grilling. We do those on the weekends when he is off of work.)

We try to keep an inventory sheet of what's in our freezer/pantry (there are tons of printables available on pinterest). It helps when its time to make your grocery list, if you already know what you've got on hand. I keep a list on the fridge of what we are running low/out of, so I grab that as well when its time to sit down. Saves me the time and trouble of having to dig through everything.

We have started buying some of our meat in bulk at Sam's. We buy a 10 lb tube of ground meat, and portion into a few meals. We normally use 2 lbs to make a big batch of spaghetti, which we eat 1 meal out of (plus a lunch for S) and freeze the rest. 2 lbs go to taco meat. D (the toddler) is a huge taco meat fan, I make my own taco seasoning so I can control the spice and sodium level. After my taco meat is cooked, I lay it out flat on a cookie sheet and over with foil and freeze, this way it doesn't clump together. Once its frozen I  put it in a ziploc bag in the freezer and just pull out as little as I need for D's lunch or dinner. The rest of the ground beef is portioned into 1 lb rounds (we leave the plastic wrap on so we can freeze more than 1 round together).

We've been buying chicken breasts in bulk as well, and prepping it all before we freeze it. Some gets cut into strips, nuggets. Some may be pounded out for Chicken Cordon Bleu (that's actually dinner tonight). Or we just portion it and write on the bag that its for Grilled Chicken, or my lunch. If I know it's for a specific meal I can write on the bag so I'm not digging through the entire freezer trying to find the chicken portioned out for whatever meal. This last grocery trip we bought a 10 lb bag of leg quarters and took this past weekend to grill them all up. We seasoned 2 quarters a few different ways, and froze them for meals later. We can either pull them out, heat it up and just serve with a side (great for a busy day or when I'm sick and S has to take care of dinner after work) or we can shred it for salad, soup.

We also buy 1-2 Pork Loins at Sam's. We can usually get 7 meals from 1 loin (plus some small lunch portions for me and D), for 20ish bucks. We cut them up ourselves, pork chops, some we leave in small loins. Prep for scallopini, or cut into "stew meat" chunks. It is time consuming but saves alot of money.

I forgot to take pictures of all the other meat we portioned out. But this is the pork. 

I've recently been baking a little bit. I try to double the recipes so I can freeze whatever is left. Corn Muffins, breakfast muffins. We keep all our chicken bones and freeze them to make stock. I also make our yogurt (D is a huge yogurt fan) and turn some of it into cream cheese.

A few helpful links : Properly Freezing Produce and 11 things you should never freeze.

I'm sure I could come up with tons more to post about this, but this is already really long (sorry about that!). If you have and questions feel free to comment and I'd be glad to answer!


 Kay