Family Meal Plan

So who doesn't like to eat? Come on....that's right, most of us do! And on a budget it can still be done, even better than once thought. Recently I was talking with a best friend of mine about how to keep the meals updated and fresh in our household and not break the bank. Here's a tool I use to help keep my family's bellies full and happy and keep the bank account feeling pretty much the same way.

After scouring the internet for ideas, I began to take a look at my Household Calendar and decided that it needed to work a little harder for me since I put so much effort into creating it. I am a fan of routines, as are my two little guys, so I put myself to the test one day. I decided to plan out all the meals for one week to see how well we could stick to it.

Here's how I did it. I broke down all the meals we have as a family for each day, keeping in mind my kids' minimal palates, coughed up some old daycare day sheets listing their typical meals, and created a "week sheet" of my own.

With me being home everyday I had to account for breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner with the kiddos. I drew up a plan using my bff Excel, laid it out with a cute color scheme and printed it out for the week. I then grabbed my favorite cookbooks which have colored tabs highlighting the pages of tried and true recipes we love {and online recipes I snag from Allrecipes and Weight Watchers} and started plotting them out on each day's dinner section. I then create the grocery list from what we need to create each days' recipes. I fill in the breakfast, lunch & snack with balanced options for the kids and let my husby manage his own lunch that I gladly make for him while prepping my oldest son's lunch in the AM.

What I came up with was a pretty and scheduled way of answering the age old question of "what's to eat Mom?" My boys {my husband and the older son at least} know to go to the clipboard that's hanging in the pantry, look for the appropriate day and see what's cooking.

To the suggestion of something I tripped on one day on the internet, I do my grocery shopping on a weekend morning and we're good to go. If there's anything perishable that is scheduled for later in the week, my loving husby will usually pick it up for me on the way home from work to be cooked that night. Other than that, I get everything on Sunday and we're locked & loaded for the week. I give us flexibility over the weekend but we've recently found that if we don't plan for Saturday or Sunday nights, we look at each other in sort of a loss because of the lack of plan.

Now don't get me wrong, we still get the occasional pizza delivered, but for the most part, I'm finding that our grocery bill has shrunk drastically every week and that our budget isn't as tight as we'd first anticipated. We use Mint to help us categorize and track our spending and we're finding that sticking to the painless family meal plan has allowed us to move our funds elsewhere and still eat like kings and queens.

So now it's your turn to share. What have you done to trim your food budget that's worked for you and your family? What successes have you had? What lessons have you learned? Any new recipes you'd like to share?

Cheers!
O