Use the comments below to tell us your tips and tricks about planning and keeping a menu for your family.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Menu Tips
Use the comments below to tell us your tips and tricks about planning and keeping a menu for your family.
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I have two very picky toddler/preschooler eaters. I was able to find about 8 or 9 meals that they both eat really well, and I have created a "lunch" menu out of those meals that repeats itself every week. It's helpful that Daddy doesn't eat lunch with us. He would get really tired of it, I'm sure! Here is the menu:
ReplyDeleteMonday: lunchmeat sandwiches
Tuesday: Mac n Cheese
Wednesday: Fish sticks and french fries
Thursday: Eggs
Friday: Chicken Nuggets
Saturday: Toasted Cheese and Tomato Soup
Sunday: Peanut Butter and Jelly
Alternate: Spaghettios, hotdogs, or pizza
This way I'm sure that my picky eaters will at least eat one full meal a day and they'll have to suck it up and try to eat what the rest of us are eating for supper! Kind of a compromise here, and it sure makes figuring out what's for lunch easy for us.
Creating a menu right after you go to the grocery store will help to ensure that you actually use all the items you bought.
ReplyDeleteAnother tip is to plan your meals around what's on sale by looking at your store's sales before you go shopping. Buy what's on sale and plan your menu around that. It's a great way to use what you buy and save money.
ReplyDeleteI used to do what Rachael suggested above, but over the past year I've been moving to a new way of doing things.
ReplyDeleteThere is an organization called Angel Food Ministries that has different food boxes available each month for purchase. It's a great program. Their "signature box" costs only $30, and it has enough food "to assist in feeding a family of four for a week." It's available to anyone (no income guidelines or anything like that), and there are distribution sites all over the US. You can check it out here: http://www.angelfoodministries.com/.
We usually buy two of the signature boxes, and we use quite a bit out of it each month. This frees up money during the month (we shop weekly but budget monthly) to not only fill in the empty slots on the menu but to also stock up when there are really good sales.
The longer that I've been doing this the more that we have been able to save, as most things that I buy these days are on sale.* I can often plan almost an entire week's worth of meals out of what we have stockpiled in our pantry and freezer, so then we have little that we actually need to purchase to complete the menu, which in turn frees up more money for sale items.
*This, of course, excludes those items that must be purchased regardless of sales: milk, some fruits and veggies, etc.
Another good way to make sure that you're getting the most for your money is to make sure that you are familiar with the regular and sale prices of the items you buy most often. I've noticed that not every item that is listed in the sale papers is really a good deal. For example, the store that I shop at often has beef roasts on sale but at different prices each time. The price I see advertised most often is $2.49 per pound, but I don't buy until I see them at $1.99 per pound. While $2.49 is better than paying regular price, it's not the best price I can get.
ReplyDeleteI can't remember the best prices for everything, so I have recently started keeping a "price book" (which is actually a spreadsheet for me). This is were I keep track of the regular and sale prices for the items that I use most often. That way, when I find a good sale, I can stock up - hopefully enough to last me until the next sale. I also keep track of when the sale prices come up. I cannot say for sure if this is true, as I have just started keeping track of prices, but I have heard that a lot of stores have things on sale in a set cycle. So if my store has hamburger on sale at its best price every six weeks, then when I see that price advertised I would buy enough to last me six weeks - until the next sale. This allows me to stretch my dollar as far as possible.
I'm not one that likes to plan ahead in a concrete way or make decisions....so my mother told me she drew a meat, starch, veggie, and fruit from different envelopes to plan the meals for each night at the beginning of the week when we were kids, so I wrote a program to do something similar. Now, I have a spreadsheet filled out with dishes my husband and I like, and I just have to decide how many times I want casseroles/etc. then click a button and I have 7 meals planned out, so I can get all the groceries they call for, and each day can pick what I'm in the mood to make off the weekly list. If anyone would like a copy of the program I'd be happy to share, it only works in Microsoft Excel. I'm planning on making it a simple executable file eventually, but I haven't had time yet.
ReplyDelete