The first step in successful meal planning is to decide how often you want to shop. I personally shop for a month at a time, but this can seem overwhelming when you are first getting started. I do recommend trying to shop at the most bi-weekly. The whole concept behind meal planning is the less you shop, the less impulse purchases you will make, and if you always have a plan of what you are going to eat then you will not rely on convenience or fast foods as heavily.
One question that I am always asked when I recommend shopping for such a long period of time is how do I keep things from spoiling? There are several ways to deal with this problem, first of all you plan your meals around things that will freeze well: meats, fresh fruits and veggies that can be chopped up and frozen, blocks of cheese that can be frozen and then thawed as needed in recipes. Your freezer is your friend when meal planning and if you do not already have a decent amount of freezer capacity then a small chest freezer is a very wise investment. There are many guides available both online and in print to help you determine what can be frozen and for how long. For items that are perishable and cannot be frozen a weekly trip to a small store (such a CVS or the Dollar Store) to pick up these types of items solves that problem, many people do this for things such as milk, which can be frozen successfully but sometimes is too much bother to fool with.
Now that you have figured out how often you want to shop you need to figure out what type of meal planning will work the best for you, I will highlight several kinds of meal plans that you can try.
The first plan style I call Rotating the Basics: This is the most simple of the styles and really easy to get started with, all you really do is assign each night a theme. So for example Monday becomes Italian Night, Tuesday, Mexican food, Wednesday, Seafood and so on. You pick tried and true meals for each theme that you want to include in your rotation, make you shopping list for the quantities of ingredients that you need to prepare that same meal however many times you are rotating it and you are ready to go.
The second style is using Pre-Made meal plans: This is good if you are following a specific diet or just need some help getting the hang of things. With this style all you do is search the web for pre-made meal plans that meet your dietary needs or appeal to your families tastes. There are many of these available online and I have personally used them in months that are extremely busy and I don't really have the time to sit down and plan a lot myself. You can even search for plans made by dietitians for certain calorie restrictions or health issues. Many plans will be weekly, but all you have to do when making your shopping list is multiply everything by 2 or 4 depending on how often you will be shopping and you are ready to go. A great advantage of this is that some even come with printable grocery lists, how easy is that?
The third and final style that I am going to mention is of course Creating Your Own plan from scratch. This is the most time consuming way and what many people think of when you mention meal planning. This involves sitting down with your calendar and your recipe books and planning a meal for each night that you will be cooking at home and developing a shopping list from that. I recommend this style only once you have a few months of successful meal planning under your belt and are ready to try things out on your own. It can be fun to do it this way and of course your family will enjoy having their favorite recipes in the rotation, but it can be time consuming. On the month that I am going to do this kind of a plan I start working on it at the beginning of the month before so that I can make sure I am ready to shop in time.
This is a lot of information to digest right at first so I will stop here for this week. Next week I will be discussing: “ Ways to stretch you proteins when meal planning for further savings.”
WEEK TWO: Stretching your proteins
This week I want to talk about advanced meal-planning strategies to lower your costs of protein sources. While there are many great coupons available out there, unfortunately coupons for things like meat are usually hard to find (unless you want to serve highly processed meats all the time). With good meal planning strategies you can offset these costs though and still provide your family with healthy meals.
The first strategy I want to discuss is “Cook Once, Eat Twice”. This strategy is great for busy families and it often utilizes my favorite utility the “Crock Pot.” There are a lot of cook books out there dedicated to this strategy and one of my favorites is by Better Homes and Gardens, entitled “Cook Once Eat Twice, Slow Cooker Recipes.” The basic idea of this strategy is you are going to cook a main dish in your Crock Pot such as, BBQ pork ribs, and this is dinner night one, then on night two you have a “assembly meal” which means you basically just have to put it together, such as shredded pork sandwiches from your leftover BBQ pork ribs. This type of planning saves both time and money, you are only buy meat for a few meals a week since they are stretching over two days, and you are saving time buy using your slow cooker and making “assembly meals”.
Another great savings strategy for meal planning is “Planned Leftovers”, this one can be a big saver, but it can get a bit repetitious and requires a lot of planning. The basic principle of this is as follows: Week 1, Sunday: Large pot roast dinner ( mean the largest you can find!), Monday: Open-Faced Roast Beef sandwiches, Tuesday: “Steak” tacos, Wednesday: Beef Stew, Thursday: Beef Stir-Fry, Friday: “Steak” Salads, Saturday: Night out. This can also be done with several roasted chickens. Week 2, Sunday: Roasted Chicken, Monday: Chicken salad sandwiches, Tuesday: Chicken burritos, Wednesday: Chicken and dumplings, Thursday: Chicken noodle soup, Friday: Chicken pot-pie, Saturday: Night out. As you can see, this can get boring, but if you are on a real tight budget, the money saved by only buying a small amount of meat can be a big benefit. You can always mix it up a bit too, say do your roasts, then another beef meal, then do your roasted chicken and just go back and forth for the two weeks, remembering to save your allotted amount of each meat in the freezer for your other meals.
The final strategy I want to talk about is meat alternatives. By simple planning to substitute one or two meals a week with non-meat proteins, you can see a significant savings and health benefits too. Beans and soy based products are often a lot cheaper than meat, carry more nutrients and fiber and can be substituted in almost all your favorite recipes. If your family is adverse to soy protein, you can still go meat-free a few nights by simply doing a bean soup, or a salad and cheese bread meal on your meat-free nights. I was a vegetarian for almost five years and during that time I learned how to substitute beans quite successfully for meats in almost any recipe. My general rule was this, if it was a red meat, (such as ground beef in Italian dishes) use a red bean such as kidney beans, and if it was a white meat, use a white bean, and of course black beans almost always substitute well in South American dishes. You can also use seafood to help reduce your meat budget if you just absolutely cannot live without meat a few nights a week. I am not talking lobster and crab of course, but sea foods like tilapia and even canned tuna can be worked into your meal plan to create savings and health benefits.
Next week I will be talking about time-saving and other tips to help you make your meal planning successful. I appreciate any and all questions and comments you would like to throw my way and happy shopping.
Week three more time and money saving tips:
This week I am going to go over several things that you can do to make meal planning go more smoothly and to save even more time and money.
This first item on my list is the Crock Pot, this is a huge time and money saver. You should really try to cook in the Crock pot at least a few times a week, once you get the hang of throwing everything in each morning you will wonder how you ever made it through a week with out using this appliance. Of course we all know that they save time, you can add your ingredients in the morning and your meal will be hot and ready in the evening. They can also save you money in several ways though, first of all you can use more dry ingredients, things like dry beans and rice are no where near the hassle that they are in conventional recipes and they cost fractions of their canned and “instant” counterparts. You can also put things straight from the freezer in the Crock pot without defrosting, talk about huge time savings! Of course there is always that moment of panic when you get home and realize you where supposed to start dinner in the Crock pot this morning and you forgot, but never fear most recipes can be done stove top.
Another key time saving trick is pre-prepping. This is simple once you get the hang of it and can save a lot of time at mealtime. When you get home from the grocery, chop up your vegetables and fruits and put them in individual containers for the meals that you will be preparing. For example, I always chop up my watermelon and cantaloupe and put it in large baggies in the fridge, then I will transfer my bagged fresh spinach to a baggy and freeze it, and dice bell pepper and freeze it. Then at meal time I just assemble ingredients and I am ready to go. Also, in the morning look at your meal plan for the day and quickly layout the things that you will be needing to cook, that way anything that needs to be defrosted is ready and everything is together in the evening when you are rushing around.
This biggest tool for successful meal planning that I can recommend is to create a menu board. This is just a simple wipe off calender or it can even be printed off your computer and posted on your fridge. On this calender you write each day what you are having that evening, and reference the cookbook and pg number that the recipe will be found in, that way you can quickly glance at it and organize your ingredients for that evening. Also this solves the endless question of what are we having, after a few replies of “go look at the board”, they will get the hang of it.
One final tip for the week is plan your nights off. I know many people who try and plan an entire month of cooking without taking into consideration meals out. This is not only unrealistic, but it puts unnecessary stress on you. Most of us are going to eat out at least once a week, so it makes sense to plan for that in your menu. I always just leave Saturday blank because that is the night that we are most likely going to go out, then if we switch and go out Friday, no bother I just cook the Friday night meal on Saturday and move on. By planning this into my week though I know that I will get a break from cooking and that I will not over buy and thus spend more than I needed to. OK, so what happens if the planned meal out comes around and there is not money in the budget to eat out? Well, my two solutions are this, clean out meals, look in the freezer for ingredients that you didn't use up and create a meal from then, or breakfast, almost everyone has the stuff on hand to make pancakes in a pinch.
Next week I will talk about getting organized for your shopping trip with your meal plan in place.
Week 4 time to shop:
This is the fourth and final installment of my Menu Planning segment, I hope that everyone has found my tips and ideas useful so far. Now that you have a solid plan in place, it is time to shop. This can be daunting at first if you are not used to shopping for an entire month at a time, but with a little planning you will soon start to wonder why you ever did it any other way.
The first thing you must do to get ready to shop is write down your plan, either on a calendar or marker board so you know what you are serving and how often. then you need to gather your recipes and start writing your ingredients onto your list. I organize my list by store department in the order that the departments appear in the store, then as I am going through my recipes I write down the necessary ingredients for the month in the correct department, make a hash mark by the ingredient for each additional time that I will be needing it in the month. I will usually write down everything even though I may have this item already on hand.
Now it is time to check your pantry, I you have been a successful couponer for a while, you more than likely have a pantry full of basic items and ingredients. Now it is time to put those items to work, go down your list just like you where at the store and mark off all the items that are already in your pantry. This usually reduces my list in about half.
Now that I have my final list it is time to set down with my coupon folder and start matching things up. Since my folder is already organized to the layout of the store I shop most often, and my list is organized the same way, it is easy to go through the folder and pull the coupons that I will need for the trip. While sorting coupons I am also going to pull coupons for items that I know to be on sale, coupons that are expiring soon that I want to look for and new products that I want to try. These extra coupons are how I will replenish my pantry so that next month my “must purchase” list will be as short as the month before.
At this point you are ready to go to the store, here are a few tips to make that a success as well. Pick the time and date that you shop carefully, I usually like to shop at the end of the previous month instead of the 1st of the month to avoid crowds, early morning and late night weekdays are usually the best time. Try to avoid bring spouses and children if at all possible as they will be a great distraction, but if you must give a child something to do, like marking off the list or holding coupons so that they are focused on the task you have given them and not distracted by the junk the store is trying to sell them. Make sure you give yourself enough time to shop, I would suggest about 2 hours for your first trip, if you are worried about the time you will forget something and defeat the whole purpose of one trip do it all. Finally pick your cashier carefully, nothing stresses a cashier out like a large order using a large amount of coupons, the older seasoned cashier is not always better, find someone who is fairly new to the job and chatty it will make the experience smoother for everyone.
As I said before I hope that everyone has enjoyed this segment and picked up some valuable tips, I enjoy all comments and questions so please feel free to leave them here, or email me at couponinginprinceton@gmail.com
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