Frugality Idea: Meal Planning

When people ask me for ideas on saving money and how I have time for cooking so much from scratch my number one answer is Menu/Meal Planning.  This saves so many extra trips to the grocery store, time during the day and lets me have a wide variety of food in our diet.

There are many online resources for meal planning.  Some even provide a grocery list once you have chosen all of your meals.  I have looked into some of these tools and for our family they just don't work well.  The main reasons they don't work well for us is that there are certain common foods we just don't like and we also have some food allergies in the family (to very common foods). 

I've done my planning several different ways over the years and I still change it up depending on how much time I have and how motivated I am to sit and make a plan.  I have also taken breaks from meal planning but always come back to it because it just makes things so much easier for me.

Sometimes I pull out several cookbooks and just flip thru until recipes catch my eye.  At other times I take stock of what we have in the cabinets and freezer and make a plan from those things.  If I have a bit more time in the evenings I'll check out some favorite recipe sites and see what I find.  I also ask the kids and Matt if there is anything they want on the menu for that week (typical answers from the kids are homemade pizza or pancakes :) ). No matter what method I choose I sit down with two pieces of paper, one for a list of recipes and one for the grocery list.  On the list of recipes I'll note what cookbook the recipe is in and what page it is on.  For recipes I print I clip them to the menu. 

Another tip that I've found helpful is to note in the cookbook if the recipe was something we liked, something I made changes to, or if we didn't care for the recipe.  This has saved me time because I can skip over any recipes that I've already noted that we don't like.

Over the past couple of years we have started getting a vegetable share from a local farm.  The day before we go to get our share I get an e-mail with a list of what will most likely be in our share.  I use this list as a guide for choosing recipes.  I also have some basics on hand that I can put together in many different ways. 

As you can see, this process is very adaptable but will certainly minimize those times of staring into the fridge or cabinet trying to figure out what to make.  Also, if you have a busy day planned you can plan a quick or easy meal for that day, cutting down on a lot of stress.