Tag Archives: frugal cooking

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 1/17-1/23

Despite the extra healthy snack foods on our list, this week’s total was back within our budget. Yay!

Our total for the week was $54. And I feel like our cart was stuffed!

Here’s our menu plan for the week:

Saturday: Chicken & vegetable pot pie (We used a store-bought pie crust to make the recipe easier, and substituted heavy cream for 1% milk to make it a little healthier. And of course I limited my portion size.)

Sunday: Stuffed manicotti (We omitted the beef and added spinach to the stuffing instead. We also left out the butter, and used low-fat cheeses.)

Monday: Sandwiches/leftovers

Tuesday: Beef tacos with refried beans

Wednesday: Grilled chicken sandwiches

Thursday: BLTs with baked oven fries

Friday: Homemade pizza

Looking back over this menu, it doesn’t include the healthiest of meals. But I find that as long as I’m careful with portioning, I can avoid eating too many calories for the day.

For more menu plans, visit OrgJunkie.

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 1/3 – 1/10

Well, it’s back to reality, which means menu planning and grocery shopping. We cleaned out our refrigerator and pantry before heading out on vacation, so we had to restock meats and some staples. No worries, though. Our grocery store had chicken breasts on sale for under $2 a pound, so we stocked up with enough chicken to last us more than two months.

After replenishing our freezer and pantry, our grand total was way over budget – about $85. Yikes! But with all the meat and several items like coffee and cheese that we buy in bulk each month, I’m not too worried about it.

For almost two weeks we’ve been eating holiday foods and restaurant meals while traveling (including an entire day of fast food yesterday as we drove 14 hours in one day — yuck!). We’re both really looking forward to getting back into the kitchen to cook some healthy homemade meals.

Here’s our first menu plan of 2009:

Sunday: Roasted chicken and red potatoes (We’ll make chicken stock with the leftovers.)
Monday: Chicken quesadillas
Tuesday: Chicken fajita tortilla soup
Wednesday: Chef’s salad
Thursday: Bean and cheese burritos
Friday: Homemade sushi (more on that later :) )

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more menu plans!

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 12/13-12/19

This week we finally saw a decrease in our grocery spending resulting from our monthly menu planning experiment. Our total was $51! That’s about $9 less than what we typically spend.

Because we bought many items earlier in the month, our list was pretty short this week. We also didn’t need to get any meat for this week’s meals, because we already had it. Even though we weren’t spending more than normal in the beginning of the month, our advance planning helped us spend less this week.

This is only one week, so I don’t have enough information to know for sure if monthly menu planning will be cheaper in the long run, but I’m certainly feeling encouraged enough to try it again in January. Most importantly, it made menu planning and grocery shopping a lot less stressful on the weekends. For that reason alone, I liked it.

Here’s this week’s menu plan (my final full week before our holiday vacation!):

Saturday: Chicken wraps and oven fries
Sunday: Steak fajitas
Monday: Dinner party with friends — we’re bringing chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
Tuesday: Bacon wrapped chicken (We’re using Monterey jack instead of blue cheese and omitting the pecans to reduce the cost of this recipe.)
Wednesday: Chicken noodle soup
Thursday: Broccoli chicken stir fry
Friday: Black bean quesadillas

Looking over this menu, it actually looks a lot more expensive than my typical menu plans. That’s why I’m so excited that we spent less than normal this week. Without monthly menu planning, this menu would have cost a lot more.

I hope you had a successful week at the grocery store!

Visit OrgJunkie for more menu plans.

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 12/6-12/12

I’m just going to come out and say it: I love monthly menu planning. Shopping this week was so simple. We already knew what we needed, and even bought some of it last week. That freed up some of our budget to spend on sale items to use in coming weeks. I think we might continue planning monthly instead of weekly from now on.

Our spending isn’t lower (we still spent about $55 this week which is pretty average for us), but planning for the month has saved us a lot of time and hassle.

As you may remember from my post’s last weekend, this month we’re on a food & financial diet. Monthly menu planning is part of that, but we’re also trying to eat healthier without spending more money.

Here’s our menu plan for the week:

Saturday: Sandwiches
Sunday: Grilled tilapia fillets and squash
Monday: Chicken and rice soup
Tuesday: Grilled chicken salad
Wednesday: Garlic chicken with broccoli and cheddar
Thursday: Chicken wraps
Friday: Bean and cheese burritos (recipe below)

Bean and Cheese burritos (from the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook)

8-inch tortillas
1 cup chopped onion
1 tbsp. cooking oil
16 oz. fat-free refried beans
Shredded lowfat cheese
Shredded lettuce
Salsa

Saute onion in oil until tender. Add refried beans. Heat through. Fill warmed tortillas with 1/4 cup beans, and cheese. Roll up and bake in 350-degree oven about 10 minutes until heated through. Serve with lettuce and salsa.

Check out OrgJunkie for more menu plans.

Menu Plan Monday & Grocery Round Up: 11/29-12/5

As part of my Holiday Food & Financial Diet this month, we spent Sunday morning planning out three and a half weeks worth of meals to last us until we leave for Christmas. These menu plans were especially tough because I’m also putting some restrictions on my diet to ward off holiday weight gain and hopefully cancel out the damage I’ve already done.

We originally planned to reduce meat consumption, but I’m also limiting my wheat and carbs consumption (to an extent) for the next three weeks. Trying to come up with vegetarian meals with pasta and bread off limits was pretty much impossible. So we planned a pretty chicken-heavy meal rotation with a few healthy carb-heavy meals (like red beans and rice) and lots of soups for the next three weeks.

Chicken wasn’t on sale this week, but we have enough in the freezer for this week’s meals. We’re crossing our fingers that it will go on sale next week so we can buy enough to carry us through the month. (Cross your fingers for me!)

This week’s total was $52. That total isn’t necessarily true to what we spent for this week alone, though. Because we already have meals planned for the next three weeks, we picked up several sale items that we know we’ll need in the near future.

Here’s the first installment of our December meal plan:

Saturday: Thanksgiving leftovers
Sunday: Turkey sandwiches
Monday: Chicken fajita tortilla soup
Tuesday: Chef’s salad
Wednesday: Red beans & rice
Thursday: Vegetarian chili
Friday: Grilled chicken wraps

I hope you’ll come back for week two of my month-long menu plan!

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more menu plans.

Fresh turkey for next to nothing next year

If you’re like me, then you found yourself staring longingly at the fresh turkeys this year, convinced that they must taste better. After all, they’re fresh.

OK, so I’m not convinced that they do taste better. My husband swears by it, though. I’ll admit, the idea of skipping the thawing process with a huge turkey taking up half my fridge for a week before Thanksgiving is appealing to me. But there’s no way I’m ever going to spend $1+ a pound for fresh turkey when the frozen ones are on sale for 49 cents a pound.

I was kicking myself yesterday, though. You see, this year Tony and I went to a potluck for Thanksgiving Day and cooked our own Thanksgiving meal yesterday. We ran out to the store for a few last minute items yesterday and discovered that fresh turkeys were deeply discounted. They were actually about 40 cents a pound.

“Why didn’t we think of that?” my husband asked.

He’s right. We’ve known since before we bought our turkey that we would be cooking on Friday. It makes perfect sense that fresh turkeys would be dirt cheap the day after the holiday. What else are they going to do with a bunch of fresh turkeys with a sell-by date a week away?

Next year we’ll try a fresh turkey, and we’ll only pay 40 cents a pound. I don’t mind cooking a day late if it’s just us again.

Thanksgiving is the most frugal day of the year

According to the American Farm Bureau, the average American family will spend $44.61 on a traditional Thanksgiving meal for 10 people this year. That’s a $2.35 increase from last year’s price, which is more than double the typical yearly increase of $1 and some change.

There’s been a lot of buzz about this increase in the news. You know what, though? That’s not too bad if you ask me. Try finding a restaurant meal of Thanksgiving proportions for under $4.50 a person. Not happening.

Thanksgiving really is the most frugal day of the year. What other day do the majority of American families stay home instead of going out to eat? Most stores are closed, so nobody is out shopping. Instead of spending money, we stay home eating a good home cooked meal and spending time with family.

I was curious about our Thanksgiving costs, so I took the time to add up the numbers for our meal. Here’s an estimate of what we spent this year:

12-pound turkey: $6
Potatoes: $2
Cubed stuffing: $2.50
Celery: $1
Fresh cranberries:$2
Canned pumpkin: $1.25
Miscellaneous cooking items (flour, sugar, eggs,milk): $3 (a very rough estimate)

Total: $16.75

It may look like we’re spending more than $8 per person, but don’t forget about the leftovers! We’ll be eating them all weekend long. :)

What about you? How much are you spending on Thanksgiving this year?

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up – 11/22-11/28

Watch out! After wrapping and shipping Christmas gifts for my niece and nephew in Seattle this morning and picking up the final things on my Thanksgiving menu, my holiday spirit has arrived. My husband probably won’t find his holiday cheer until next weekend when we put up the tree. He doesn’t appreciate the pre-Thanksgiving Christmas music so much. He’ll get over it. :)

Our grand total for groceries this week was $56. Not too bad for the week of Thanksgiving. In the past, I’ve waited until the last minute to buy everything I needed for our Thanksgiving meal and ended up with a $100+ grocery bill. This time, I split up my list throughout the month of November to reduce the burden. All we picked up this week was some produce and random last minute items.

Some friends invited us to a potluck Thanksgiving dinner Thursday. We’re happy to spend the holiday with friends, but my husband doesn’t want to miss out on roasting his own turkey. So we’ll be making our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. That means two Thanksgiving dinners for us. Fine by me. :)

Here’s our holiday menu plan:

Sunday: Strip steaks, green beans, and baked potatoes
Monday: Chicken and dumplings
Tuesday: Chicken tacos
Wednesday: Homemade pizza
Thursday: Potluck Thanksgiving with friends (We’re bringing homemade green bean casserole.)
Friday: Thanksgiving dinner
Saturday: Leftovers, because there’s no way we’re going to eat all the food we make on Friday. :)

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more menu plans. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

TGIF Link Round Up: Countdown to Thanksgiving Edition

Photo by dongkwan

Thanksgiving dinnerLess than a week until Turkey Day! I can’t tell you how excited I am for four days of cooking, eating and relaxing. I absolutely love Thanksgiving.

We have pretty much everything we need for our no-stress frugal Thanksgiving for two. We bought it all in advance. We might have to pick up a thing or two at the grocery store this weekend, but for the most part all that’s left to do is cook and eat! Yum!

For those of you who haven’t finished menu planning and shopping for the holiday, I wanted to share some Thanksgiving recipes/ideas from my Reader this week:

Happy Friday! Yay for a three-day week next week!