Meal Planning Week 2

Thanks all for the awesome ideas and positive feedback!  Since posting about meal planning I have had several friends message me ideas of what else I could do.

After the first week of planning meals I noticed a couple of things:

1.  I ate a lot better

     Instead of searching around last minute to figure out what to cook for the boys - I knew what I had and what I was going to do, and had all of the ingredients ready.  Because we planned for healthier meals, we ate much better.

2.  We spent less money

     Normally Luke or myself would be running to the grocery store 3 or 4 times a week to get things to make food.  When there, we would also pick up other things and spent more than we needed to.  With having everything planned out, there was no need to go to the store and I only had to go once to get more milk.  I am estimating that we saved $30-$50 for the week.

3.  We were not wasting food

     This seems extreme after a week but you would be amazing *and disgusted on how much food Luke and I have thrown out in the past.  We buy something, thinking we would cook it, never get to it, and throw it out a week later.  This has always been frustrating to me (having lived in very poor countries before) and I am happy to say that this is making a change.  We used what we had and I did not have to throw anything out.  We were able to eat leftovers and I think did a great job.

For our week 2 of meal planning I took an idea from my friends Cindy and Gail who mentioned 'freezer meals'.  I had glanced at them on Pinterest thinking "oh yea, that looks like a good idea" and left it there to rot on my board.  However, this week, I decided to give it a go.

I returned to that good old pin and dusted the cobwebs off and set off on the freezer week adventure.  The meals I went with are from Passion For Saving with her week of meals.  I loved this because she had it all set out (shopping list and all).  All of the recipes seemed really good and things that my boys would eat.  I will be interested to see the flavor but excited to give them a try.

It started with the grocery shopping.  I went to Walmart and spent more than she had said.  I figured that into me buying organic meats mostly since I like to think the chickens and turkeys had good lives before they enter my belly.  Total for all of the groceries I spent about $80 for 6 meals.  $13 a meal to feed 4 people seemed pretty good to me.  After the shopping - it was onto the prep.

Let me just start by saying - freezer meals are great, but man, the mess is a lot.  I have never been a great cook and get easily overwhelmed with recipes (just ask my husband) but what I liked about these from Passion For Saving was that she put in the beginning what you needed to do BEFORE assembling the freezer meals.  That way, you aren't prepping and then realize that you need cook something before adding it to the bag.

Putting them all together was not that difficult and they fit very nicely into our freezer.  I am excited to taste them and will let you guys know how they turned out!  Please let me know if you have any other fun healthy ideas for week 3!