Family Meal Planning

One of my more popular posts was about family Meal Planning. I was going to write an ebook on the subject and offer it for free here on the blog, but I don’t actually know how to publish an ebook and it would only be like 9 pages anyway, so I decided to just offer it here in an extra-long post. I hope some of you find this info helpful! Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you do to get started. Many of these ideas came from a homemaking author named Donna Otto who wrote a lot of books in the 90’s. You can get her books on Amazon. I’m going to use a baseline of a $100 budget to feed a family of 4, which works out to be less than $5 per meal, about $1.20 per person, and includes main dishes, fruits, vegetables, and drinks. Try doing that with the $1 menu at McDonald’s!

Part 1: Stocking Up

You probably already have most of the basics in your pantry and refrigerator. I’m talking about salt, pepper and other spices, condiments, flour, sugar, etc. If you do not have these basics yet, you will need to purchase them before you can start long-term meal planning for your family.

You can either make a separate grocery trip and spend about $100 stocking up, or you can add an extra $10 or so to your grocery budget for the first few weeks. Either way, you will want to make sure that at a minimum, your pantry and refrigerator are stocked with the following items:

Spices:

Salt, pepper, Italian Seasoning, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Garlic Powder, SeasonAll, Old Bay

Pantry:

Flour, Sugar, Brown Sugar, Baking Soda, Baking Powder, Corn Starch, Pancake Syrup, Vegetable Oil, Cocoa Powder (I prefer a mix like Nesquick that can be used to make chocolate milk, but also used in making icings, etc) Peanut Butter, Bisquick, Vinegar

Refrigerator:

Mayonnaise, Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, Pickles, Worcestershire sauce, your favorite salad dressing, jelly, butter

As you are able to afford, add additional spices like oregano, basil, thyme, paprika, etc. to your spice cabinet. Do not purchase exotic spices or ones that you hardly ever use unless and until they are called for. Spices are expensive and it does not make sense to waste money on spices that sit in your cabinet, unused until they expire and must be thrown out.

Adjust your list to fit your needs. If you love rosemary, but can’t stand ketchup, obviously your list of basics will look a bit different than the one above.

Once you have these things in stock, it is much easier to throw together a quick meal. Of course, there are other things, like milk and bread, that you should always keep in stock. Those kind of basics will be included in the weekly grocery budgets and meal plans that I will share with you, but since we are talking about stocking up, we will discuss them here as well. Of course you can also stock up on things like frozen vegetables as you find them on sale.

Here is a grocery list that is already filled out with the basic items that most of us like to have on hand. I find that most of the time I tend to buy the same basic ingredients over and over again and just re-work them from one week to the next. (Ground beef might be sloppy joes this week, meatloaf next week, and tacos the week after that.)Just print out the list and circle the items you plan to purchase this week. You can even laminate it and circle the items in a dry erase marker. It will save you a lot of time re-writing your lists.

Grocery List

Produce:

LettuceCeleryPineappleBeets Broccoli

TomatoesStrawberriesApplesBagged SaladOther:

OnionsBlueberriesOranges Asparagus

PotatoesBananasCarrotsCorn

Sweet PotatoesSpinachGarlicPeas

Starches:

CerealOatmealBagels StuffingTortillasMac & Cheese

BreadRolls RiceInstant Potatoes

Meat:

Ground BeefChickenFishSteakHamPorkSausageBaconTurkeyLunch meat

Dairy:

MilkCreamYogurtCheese slicesShredded CheeseCream CheeseRicotta Cheese

Miscellaneous:

Eggs

Soup

Juice

Soda

Pretzels

Chips

Other:

Part 2: Walking Through a Week

I recommend doing your meal planning on Sundays because that’s the day coupons come in the paper and it’s also the day stores are restocking for the upcoming week. At some point during the day on Sunday, I like to sit down with a chart like this one. It’s very easy to make a chart like this in Mocrosoft Word. I usually order our groceries online Sunday evening and pick them up on Monday while Nicholas is at preschool. It’s a cool service that our store offers for an extra fee of $4.95.

In our family, like most others, we tend to always go back to a few staples: cereal or oatmeal for breakfast, grilled cheese and soup at lunch time, and dinners made from the same basic ingredients week after week. In order to keep things from being too repetitious, I try to vary the type of cereal, or cut up fruit to go with it. Maybe I’ll throw a few chocolate chips, nuts, or blueberries in the oatmeal. As much as I would like to be able to say that I’m frying eggs and flipping pancakes every morning, that’s just not our reality and I don’t think it’s the reality for most families in America. I will include a few affordable homemade breakfast and lunch ideas in my plans, but I also want to be realistic. My experience as a mom tells me that there will probably be more Poptart mornings than there will be homemade smoothie ones, but that’s one of the great things about meal planning; when you prepare ahead of time it is just as easy and affordable to take homemade blueberry pancakes out of the freezer than it is to buy processed, pre-frozen waffles.

I’d like to walk you through how I go about planning our family meals. I start with an empty chart and fill in one meal at a time for the entire week. I start with breakfast and plan out the entire week. Remember, it is ok to repeat meals. If you buy an entire box of cereal you should use it for more than one meal.Maybe your chart will start off looking something like this:

As I fill out the chart, I will add the items I need for each meal to my grocery list. I also like to write an estimated cost next to each item to make sure I stay on budget. At this point my grocery list would look something like this:

Cereal: $3

Bananas: $1.50

Oatmeal: $3.50

Blueberries: $3

Eggs: $3 (2 dozen)

Milk: $6 (2 gallons)

Juice: $4

Bread: $4.50 (2 loaves)

Cheese: $4

Bisquick: $3

Right now the total would be at $35.50, which might seem like a lot for breakfast, but keep in mind that some of those items, like the bread and cheese, will be used in other meals throughout the week as well.

Then I’ll skip down to dinner. The reason for this is that we will sometimes eat our dinner leftovers for lunch the next day, and I will include that in my plan when I write down the lunches.

I always include at least one free space in the week for flexibility. We might decide to order a pizza or meet friends for dinner, those things would cost money, but I would consider that part of our entertainment budget. Maybe we get invited to the grandparent’s house or maybe we will just use up some left-overs on that night. I find that including one free space for dinner actually saves us money because I’m not buying extra food to fill up that space, it makes us use up left-overs, and when we are invited out, we aren’t throwing away food that went to waste because we didn’t get around to cooking it before it went bad.

After planning those dinners, I would need to add the following items to my store list:

Ground beef $4

Frozen Corn: $2

BBQ Sauce: $2

Chicken drumsticks $3

Frozen Broccoli $1

Spaghetti $1.50

Pasta Sauce $3

Hot Dogs $4

Rolls $3

Tea bags $3

This adds another $29.50, which brings my total up to $62. I could buy refrigerated pizza crust, but I am planning to make the pizza crust, waffles, and pancakes out of the Bisquick. Buying tea bags and making my own iced tea will save money because I can but a box of tea bags for about the same price as a gallon of ready-made tea, but the box of tea bags will make several gallons.

Next, I will take inventory of what I already have on my list and what I am planning to make for dinners and start to fill out the lunch category. This allows me to utilize what I already have and buy as little as possible

We like to go to Little Caesars and get a $5 pizza on Sundays for lunch after church, so I use that as my free lunch space. In order to round out my grocery list for this menu, I would need to add:

4 cans of soup: $6

Lunch meat: $4

1 family sized box of Mac & cheese $3

This brings my total so far to $75, although I could probably get it lower with coupons or a store loyalty card. That leaves me an extra $25 in my budget. I would spend $13 on snacks for the week, like carrot sticks, apples, pretzels, and popcorn. The rest I would either save and put toward a pizza night or spend on stocking up on my staples, like making sure I will have PB&J for next week’s lunches or buying extras of whatever was on sale this week to keep in the freezer.

Now that you’ve done all that work, save the meal plan and grocery list for that week. You really only need to do this about 8 times, then you can just rotate the plans. Your family will never remember that they ate this same food in a similar pattern two months ago.

Next week when I start to make my chart, I will take notice of what I have left-over from this week, like the extra oatmeal, and fill out those meals first so that I save as much money as possible.

Do you have any other meal planning tips and tricks to share?