Posts Tagged ‘meal planning’

Ideas for Healthy Cheap Meals When Money is Tight

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Unemployed? Frustrated by rising food prices? Don’t worry! You and your family can still eat well. Here are some cheap meals menu ideas that will reduce the food budget. However, the most important thing isn’t the food you make, it’s the menu planning you do before you even spend a dime.

Please do not neglect menu planning if money is tight. Our Menu Planning 101 post is a good place to start.

1. Eggs are cheap and delicious.  About $2.50 for 18 eggs is not too bad. Add in a $2.50 bag of potatoes for hashbrowns, some cheese (save more money by shredding it yourself) and you have the fixings of a delicious, filling breakfast for the week. (Tip: Bake the potatoes, refrigerate, and then fry ‘em up as you need them all week long.)

When you’re sick of eggs, combine them with flour and sugar to make muffins.

2.Soup is also a good way to stretch the food budget. Buy a small whole chicken and boil in water with some onion and carrots to make the broth–this should all cost less than $7.  Remove the chicken, save the breasts for another meal, put the deboned dark meat in the pot and add some rice.

The chicken breasts can be shredded for chicken salad (just add mayo and serve on bread) or make great chicken enchiladas (tortillas, cheese, beans, can of enchilada sauce).

3.Super cheap dried beans with just 1lb of meat make for an excellent chili. The recipe on this site makes a lot so consider freezing half of it for another time.

Per #2, bean soup would be a yummy, filling lunch for just pennies per serving.

4. Use cheaper cuts of meat. Chicken thighs and drumsticks are pretty inexpensive, but make delicious meals.  We’re actually working on a few recipes using cheaper cuts that will be posted soon-ish.

5.Skip cereal and eat oatmeal instead. Not only is oatmeal better for you,it’s cheaper and comes in large containers. Big, off brand containers can sometimes be found for under $3 and would last more than a week.

6.Do it yourself. If money is tight, it’s time to grate your own cheese and to stop buying bagged lettuce–the fresh, unprocessed lettuce is about 50% cheaper. Start a small garden too. Stop paying someone else to do the work–do what you can at home and grow your own. Every little bit saves you money.

7.Switch to frozen fruits and veggies. They are usually quite a bit cheaper than fresh and much better than their canned counterparts.

Notice how these tips do not rely on highly processed foods full of refined sugars! This is healthy food on the cheap, the whole point of this blog; good food, cheap meals.

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursdays.

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Meal Planning: After the Family Vacation

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Howdy. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, just went on vacation on the other side of the country. A vacation that started and ended with various forms of flu for the entire family. There was even a funeral in there somewhere. It’s been a looooooong month.

One of the things I really appreciated, in the midst of all the chaos, was the effort I put into having meals ready to go for the first few days home.  Before we left, I took a quick survey of the freezer and fridge and made a post-vacation menu plan  for when we walked in the door, travel weary and in need of some good comfort food. The freezer was stocked with heat and eat meals and I had a few essentials in the fridge that I knew would keep for the ten days we were gone.

The preparation not only saved us money, it was a godsend. We were all sick and dragging. Our daughter, a toddler, did not adjust to the new time zone well and for several days was up for the day at 3:30 am. It was nice to not have to wait on takeout or need to rush out to the grocery store immediately. I had everything we needed until we could regroup from our trip.

So, the next time you and your family are planning a vacation, don’t forget to take a few minutes to plan for the aftermath too. Eggs and bacon will keep for ten days and are a great ‘welcome home’ meal. Pancakes are a good option as well.  Fruit like oranges and apples will often keep for a week or more in the fridge , or you could buy a few cans of fruit. Stock your freezer with whatever meals sound good to you. We had the fixings for pizza on hand and I also pulled out some chicken enchiladas from the deep freeze.

In the past, we would’ve spent easily $100 on takeout until we recovered from our travels. I literally saved $100 with 15 minutes of planning and organization.

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Meal Planning 101: A Guide for the Lost

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Today is pizza day and I just put the dough in the oven to rise under the baking light. While the yeast works its magic, I thought I would talk a little bit about meal planning.

Last night I was perusing a selection of frugal cookbooks and all of them hyped meal planning, but none of them actually told readers how to do it. So here’s how to meal plan, according to moi. (Please add your tips, tricks, and techniques in the comments.)

1.List out every recipe you make regularly and that your family likes. Hopefully, you come up with about 14-20 recipes. Here’s my list…

1.Pizza
2.Calzones
3.Steak
4.Italian chicken
5.BBQ chicken
6.BBQ pork
7.Hamburgers
8.Unstuffed cabbage casserole
9.Haulshki (E. European recipe with cabbage, bacon and noodles)
10.Vienerschnitzl with pork chops
11.Kielbasa on the grill
12.Kielbasa in the slow cooker with veggies and kraut
13.Goulash
14.Chicken Soup
15.White Chili with Chicken
16.Red Chili
17.Bean and bacon soup
18.Zuppa Tuscana soup
19.Split pea and ham soup
20.Julia Child’s butter lubed chicken
21.Pepper Steak
22.Meatballs and spaghetti
23.Asian lettuce wrap salad
24.Roast turkey breast w/ veggies
25.Roast chicken w/ veggies
26.Frozen ravioli
27.Frozen cheese tortellini
28.Chicken enchiladas
29.Tacos or taco salad
30.Roast beef with veggies

2.List out recipes you would like to master but haven’t had a chance to try for one reason or another. This step gives you and your family some variety and this is how you’ll discover new family favorites. Here are some I would like to try:

1.Honey spice chicken
2.Chicken Piccata (I keep trying and it just doesn’t want to turn out for me)
3.Lemon chicken

Now between 1&2 you should be able to create a rotational menu. Since I have over 30 recipes, I could, in theory, plan out a month’s worth of meals at one sitting. Typically, however, I only plan out 2 weeks at a time because real life doesn’t respect menu plans and has a way of mixing things up.

For example, last night I overcooked the steak. I found it delicious still, but my husband wouldn’t touch it so he ran out for a quick burger. Life happens and because of that I don’t bother to try and forecast meals too far into the future.

3.Don’t forget to check the sales ads before finalizing any meal plans. If it’s buy-one-get-one chicken week at the grocery store, you would, of course, want to take advantage of those savings.

You can also visit couponmom.com and see what deals they show for your area. Couponmom.com is free and if you have several grocery chain stores in your area, it can be a quick way to find the best deals. It doesn’t work so well for me because, as I mentioned in another post, we only have 1 chain in the area which limits the comparison shopping.

4.So now you have a list of recipes (I hope! If not, time to hit the cookbooks for inspiration) and you know what is on sale right now this very moment at your local grocery store. Between these two facts, create a menu plan that accommodates what you know how to cook well (and what your family will eat) as well as taking into account the lowest available prices on food.

5.This is an optional step, but one that I think is important. Once you have a set repertoire of recipes, it’s time to bulk buy common ingredients and keep them handy in the pantry and freezer. This article on food storage calculation gives a simple formula on how to do this.

6.The other important component of meal planning is ‘feeding the freezer’. I try to take 1-2 servings of all my casseroles right off the top, before serving anyone else, and put them in the freezer. This freezer stash is your new ‘take out’ menu for days you can’t cook or for when illness strikes (don’t forget to freeze some chicken soup!).

Sometimes I even include a meal to make just for the freezer as part of my menu plan.

And that’s it. The core basics of meal planning.

Now please realize it takes time to master meal planning. You are going to make mistakes. Over buy, under buy, pay too much, forget to freeze, forget to thaw, get in a rut and try a new recipe that ends in disaster etc… Learning from your mistakes is what improves your meal planning skills so don’t get too frustrated.

In a way, cheap meals aren’t cheap. They may cost less money, but they tend to take more time. Especially when people are first learning how to cook and shop more frugally. Once you are past the worst of the learning curve, you should see substantial savings and things will run much more smoothly in the kitchen.

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