Meal Planning

I have been meal planning pretty seriously for the last five months. I'm not going to lie but at first it was quite the undertaking and a little time consuming until I found a routine that worked for me. Another challenge I had when I first started meal planning was broadening my recipe collection. So enough rambling...Here is how I meal plan:

The first thing I do is grab the sales ad and coupons for my favorite grocery store, Cashwise. I look first for any really great deals that jump out at me and then I focus more on meats since that is the focus of most of our meats. There is a home expansion pack that you can get to go with the Happy Planner that comes with a meal planning, cleaning, and budgeting section. I don't really use the cleaning and budgeting sections because I have other places I track those things but I do use the meal planning section.

 Here is a close up of my grocery list. The only thing I don't like about it is that there isn't enough room to write down prices. I have a very strict budget that I have to stick to and I wish I could keep track of that right with this list.

 Once I have most of my grocery list written down from the sales ad I will head over to my Pinterest food board and look for recipes and fill them in on my meal plan.

 Before I start scheduling meals for each day I will write down my work schedule and if we have any events going on. I do most of the cooking in our house so I try to schedule the more labor intensive meals when I have off or when I know I will have the time to prepare them. I try to save the easy quick meals for my husband if I have to work in the evening or if I work all day and know that I don't have a lot of time to get a big meal ready in time for the kids. 

 I then make a second list so I can write in the prices of my items to get an idea of how much I am going to be spending before I go and then I can see if I need to swap something out. I write down the current sale price and the full price to add to my pricing binder (pictures below). I don't like to take my Happy Planner with me to the grocery store because it just doesn't hold up that well so making this smaller list helps with that too.

 Here is a look at my meal planning binder that I used before I got my Happy Planner. I think I will go back to using it when I run out of pages in my Happy Planner in a few weeks. It just functions much better for me and it's nice to keep everything in one place.

I have a section in the binder for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack ideas. 

 Here is the section where I keep track of the prices of items when they are not on sale. My ultimate goal is to figure out how much each meal would cost me if the items were not on sale. 

 Here is an example of my grocery list before my Happy Planner with all my prices written in it. I make notes as I shop like if an item was out, quantity of each item, add anything I bought on an impulse, and if there was a coupon book out that week. I then highlight the item once I have entered it into my pricing section.

 I also have a section in my binder where I try to keep an inventory of what is in the pantry. I don't update it every time I use something but more like the day before I sit down to meal plan that way I don't have to stop planning every 5 minutes to get up and see if we have an ingredient. 

Now some people may look at all this and say it's way too much work. This is just the way that I like to meal plan and you could really make it much simpler. While I think it's important to have a pricing and pantry inventory section you may not think that's necessary for you. I will also say my first month or two I did go over my grocery budget because I was trying new things and adding new spices that we don't usually have on hand. After that though meal planning really does help me stay on budget. We eat out less because we know what we are eating in advance and I just need to remember to take what we need for that meal out of the freezer the night before. We are also wasting a lot less food. Both of the examples I blogged about today are from the fall and summer. I have one more planning page in my Happy Planner that I will use for the next week and then I am going back to using my binder. I was able to stock up on some really good deals so unless there is another coupon book I don't anticipate having to grocery shop for a couple weeks. Whenever it is that I do sit down to do my next meal plan and grocery shopping trip I will try to blog about it right away so you can see a more current meal plan. If you are interested in starting to meal plan I hope this gives you some ideas!

***Update: This post was only up for 5 minutes before my mother texted me and informed me that Cashwise has a coupon book out that is good over the next two weeks. Looks like there will be another meal planning post very soon!***

SB