Menu Plan 4/1 to 4/7

Every Thursday I plan to share what our meal plan is for the upcoming week.  Meal planning is one of the easiest, most controllable things you can do for your family to save money and eat healthier.  

I typically shop on Thursday or Friday because that is when our local stores typically start their “special sales”.  That and I don’t like shopping on the weekends because a) the stores are more crowded and b) we’re usually pretty busy on the weekends and I hate taking time away from family time for grocery shopping. My meal plan goes from Saturday through Friday.  We typically eat out once a week, usually on Fridays, although we might change that up a bit to take advantage of kids eat cheap/free nights on the other days of the week.

For lunch the girls usually eat either tuna fish, hot dogs, peanut butter and jelly, grilled cheese, or quesadillas, along with fruit, organic mac & cheese, yogurt, or some other quick and easy sides.  Chad usually takes leftovers as his lunch to work.   I usually have leftovers if they need to be eaten up, or will eat whatever the girls are eating.

So here is what is on the agenda for us this week.  I have to say its getting a bit hard to menu plan, since I gave up cheese (and yogurt) for Lent and I now apparently can’t eat beans (since beans do NOT seem to agree with Lizzie).  So the remaining weeks of Lent will be interesting. 

Saturday: We have something going on where I won’t need to cook.

Sunday:  Something else going on this day, so probably we will eat out or get take out. 

Monday:  Sloppy Joes on homemade buns, homemade oven fries or skillet potatoes, veggies.  Probably asparagus and green beans since they are on sale this week.

Tuesday:  Ham and Lentil Soup, homemade corn muffins.  This is a new recipe, we’ll see how it goes over.  I figured I’d throw one more soup meal in since it looks like it will still be fairly cool next week.  And TH and I both have meetings on Tuesday so I wanted something we can keep warm and eat when we can.

Wednesday:  Chicken and Rice bake to use up some leftover cooked chicken I have, veggies, maybe some homemade french bread if I have time. 

Thursday:  Leftovers if we have any, if not, spaghetti with meat sauce.  We have something that night at Carlie’s school and I have a mom’s group meeting at church, so we need something quick and easy.  I hope we have enough leftovers, that will be much easier.

Friday:  Fish Fry at church.  Yum!

On the shopping list for this week: 

My goal is to spend under $100 each week on groceries.  This week I’m only shopping at Price Chopper.  They have ground beef on sale and we’re out.  Hy-Vee and Hen House have some decent sale items, but nothing I need that badly or at that deep of a discount to justify a multi-store trip.  Not when I  have to drag 2 or more kids with me to the store.  And I’d love to make a trip to Whole Foods for some yogurt they have on sale, but again, not in the cards this week. 

For fruit and veggie we’ll do the usual bananas, a few Braeburn apples for TH to take to work that are on sale for $.99/lb, some grapes (because the little ones are tired of apples) for $1.99/lb, and asparagus for $.99/lb. 

The usual in dairy of yogurt, cheese, milk, eggs.

As I said before, ground beef is on sale for $1.99/lb.  That’s the cheapest I’ve seen in a while, so I’ll get quite a bit to store in the freezer.

And just a few miscellaneous items, like sandwich bread, coffee, lentils for the soup, rice for the chicken and rice bake, some tortilla chips because we’re out and I can’t get to Costco to get our favorites right now, and some hamburger helper to donate at church.

Because of not needing to cook this weekend and there not being much worth stocking up on right now, I only expect to spend about $70 this week.  I needed to do that, as we spent a bit for some food items at Costco (how can you go to Costco and not drop a small fortune on all their yummy food!) a few weeks ago and I needed to underspend my weekly to make up for that trip.  Glad that I’ll be ending March on a positive note!

What about you?  Do you menu plan?  If so, tell me about what your next week’s plan is, or share a link to your blog.