Tag Archives: frugal cooking

Menu Plan Monday & Grocery Round Up: 10/11-10/17

Is it really the middle of October already? Wow.

We had a great week at the grocery store, which is good for us considering that this week has completely blown our food budget. We’re going to have to keep things tight at the grocery store for the rest of the month to reduce the impact.

This week we stayed within budget with a total of about $56. That includes five pounds of chicken bought at the lowest price I’ve seen per pound at any of our grocery stores ($1.99/lb). As I’ve said before, we use a lot of chicken, so we like to stock up with a few pounds when it’s on sale at that price. I was expecting the bulk chicken purchase to put us over $60 for the week. It didn’t. Yay!

I’m in the mood for some fall cooking this week, so we’re trying a couple of hearty meals. We’re combining these new fall recipes with some old, inexpensive standbys to keep our meals simple and our costs lower. Here’s our menu plan for the week:

Saturday: Homemade pizza (We’re having it tonight instead of yesterday because we went out to eat for my birthday last night.)
Sunday: Turkey meatloaf and mashed potatoes
Monday: Pasta with butternut squash
Tuesday: Sandwiches/leftovers
Wednesday: BLTs with oven fries

Thursday: Herb roasted chicken breasts & roasted potatoes
Friday: Homemade pizza

I’m excited to try the turkey meatloaf and butternut squash pasta! I’ll let you know how it turns out!

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more meal plan inspiration!

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 9/27-10/3

My menu plan and grocery round up are a little late this week. We opted to skip the grocery yesterday for Tony’s birthday.

Our grand total this week was $42 and some change! Looks like we had a phenomenal week, huh? Well, not so fast.

We’re leaving town to visit my sister in Seattle on Friday, so we only needed to buy groceries for 6 days this week.

Based on our $50/week grocery budget, we spend roughly $7 a day for groceries. That means our $42 bill was dead on with our budget. Great, but not as great as going $8 under budget would be. :)

Since we’re preparing for our short vacation, we decided to keep our menu very simple this week. We’re also trying to use up some of our pantry staples.

Here’s our menu plan for the shortened week:

Saturday: Monthly restaurant meal (and Tony’s birthday dinner! :))
Sunday: Herb roasted chicken breasts with green beans and mashed red potatoes (see recipe below)
Monday: Whole wheat penne with garlic herb marinara
Tuesday: Sandwiches/leftovers
Wednesday: Whole wheat spaghetti with pesto
Thursday: Homemade pizza
Friday: Dinner with my sister and my parents in Seattle!

Herb roasted chicken breasts and red potatoes

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2 tsp. dried rosemary
2 tsp. dried thyme
1 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. ground pepper
1 clove minced garlic
2 tbsp. olive oil

Combine seasonings with olive oil in small bowl. Spread liberally onto chicken breasts. Cut red potatoes into fourths. Coat in olive oil, and season liberally in salt and pepper. Surround chicken breasts with one layer of potatoes in roasting pan. Roast in 375-degree oven for 30 minutes or until chicken is cooked through and juices run clear.

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more menu plans!

Life without a microwave

Yesterday, Kelly at Almost Frugal Food wrote a post about heating and reheating food without a microwave. Like Kelly, I don’t have a microwave, and I don’t want one. So I thought I’d throw in my two cents and tips on the topic.

Cutting the microwave out of your life is a great way to improve your diet. My husband used to live predominantly on microwaveable food in college. Generally, the stuff is pretty bad for you.

Cooking without a microwave is also better for your budget. Convenience foods, which come complete with high-tech packaging designed to make them taste less like microwaved food, are also a drain on the budget. Cooking with whole foods from scratch is much more economical than packaged convenience foods designed for microwave cooking.

I’ve also just never been completely comfortable with the idea of microwaves, to be honest. The idea of toxins and carcinogens being released by heating plastic in the microwave is more than a little disconcerting. Am I being paranoid? Probably. But I can live with that.

The bigger issue is that I hate the way food tastes when it’s heated or reheated in a microwave. It always comes out with a chewy, dry consistency. For the longest time I thought I hated leftover pizza. Turns out I just hated the way it tasted when it was reheated in a microwave.

Many people react with shock and horror when I tell them I don’t have a microwave. “How do you reheat anything?!” It’s like the entire fabric of their universe is crashing down on them.

I’ve never understood why people are so horrified by the idea of life without a microwave. The truth is, there’s nothing a microwave can do that a stove top or conventional oven can’t do better. It takes a little more time, but the tastier results are worthwhile.

Soups and pastas can be reheated simply by throwing them into a pot or skillet over medium-low heat on the stove top. Pizza, casseroles, and lasagna can be reheated for 10-20 minutes in a 300-350 degree oven.

Need to defrost meat? Refer to your menu plan before you go to bed, and place the meat you’ll need for tomorrow’s dinner into the refrigerator to thaw for 24 hours. Forgot to take your chicken breast out of the freezer last night? It happens. Just put it in a bowl in the sink with slow, steady stream of cool water trickling into the bowl. It’ll thaw in about 20 minutes.

The only thing we can’t make is microwave popcorn. No big deal. We buy stove top Jiffy Pop. It’s more fun anyway. :)

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Our method for meal planning

It can take a while to get the knack of meal planning. We’ve been doing it for two years now, and our method has evolved into something that works pretty well and helps us save money, so I thought I’d share with all of you.

Every Saturday or Sunday morning depending on our schedule, my husband and I sit down with the store circulars for the two grocery stores near us. If we haven’t picked up the circulars, we can find the sale information at MyGroceryDeals.com. It’s completely free and easy. You just enter your favorite stores, and it gives you their sale information.

First, we go through all of the current sale prices to see if anything jumps out at us. There’s usually at least one meat sale every week for beef, chicken, or pork. Knowing which meat is on sale gives us an idea of what kind of meals we’ll be making. If there’s nothing on sale, like this week, then we stick with chicken, because we usually buy it in bulk and always have it on hand.

We also look at the sale prices for produce and dairy. A great deal on certain vegetables or cheese might encourage us to make one of our favorite vegetarian dishes.

If we’re crunched for time or we’re not feeling creative, then we stick to a basic repertoire of quick and easy meals that we make frequently. These include things like tacos, chicken quesadillas, BLTs, & chicken and broccoli. Our repertoire is constantly evolving and growing as we try new things.

If we’re feeling creative or we’re in the mood to expand our repertoire, we search for new recipes that include the sale items we’ve decided to buy. Our favorite website for this is FoodNetwork.com. It has an easy search interface that allows you to enter the ingredient for a list of meals that include it. Other good sites that we’ve used include AllRecipes.com, Elise.com, and Taste of Home. There are many recipe sites on the web based on the same principle, so sometimes all it takes is a simple Google search.

Once we’ve decided on our meals, we plan which nights we’ll eat them based on ingredients we’re using or reusing and other factors. For instance, if we’re having fish, we always cook it the same day that we buy it. If we’re roasting a whole chicken and using the leftovers for chicken quesadillas later in the week, then obviously the roasted chicken comes first. If we know we’ll be pressed for time on a certain night, then we’re sure to plan for a quick and easy meal. Ingredients with a long shelf life are saved until the end of the week, and weekends are reserved for more complicated recipes.

We organize our grocery list based on the layout of the store. All of the items are split up into categories: Produce, Dry Goods, Dairy, and Meat. We go through each recipe and write down its ingredients based on the categories.

Categorizing all of our items streamlines the shopping process, and makes it easier to remember everything on our list. We don’t run the risk of back tracking to the produce section for an item that was written in at the bottom of the list. If we’re shopping the sales at more than one store, then we note on the list where the item will be purchased.

Finally, once our list is complete, I go through my coupon stash to make sure I don’t have any useful coupons. I usually don’t since we don’t buy many processed foods, but it never hurts to check.

This is the method that we’ve found most effective for both time and money management. What methods work best for you?

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Menu Plan Monday & grocery round up – 9/13-9/19

Since we stocked up on 5 pounds of chicken breasts last week and I wasn’t thrilled with this week’s meat prices, we decided to stay away from the meat department today.

The result is our best grocery bill yet: $50.42! That doesn’t include $15 at Costco for our monthly purchase of coffee and mozzarella cheese for homemade pizza, but I’ve decided to leave that out so I can savor this week of budget perfection. Yes, I know it’s cheating. No, I don’t care. :)

And now for this week’s meal plan:

Saturday: Porterhouse steak, white potatoes, and green beans (We bought the steak on sale weeks ago, and one steak feeds both of us.)
Sunday: Late summer minestrone soup with garlic toast
Monday: Arroz con pollo adaptation (made with chicken breast instead of a whole chicken)
Tuesday: Leftovers
Wednesday: Italian grilled cheese & tomato sandwiches
Thursday: Grilled chicken breast sandwiches with oven fries
Friday: Homemade pizza

It’s so satisfying when I’m able to stay within budget!

Be sure to visit OrgJunkie for more great meal plans.

Growing herbs indoors?

This week Works for Me Wednesday at Rocks in My Dryer is backwards — bloggers post their problems and open up the comments section for solutions. I’m reposting a question that I asked last week about indoor herb gardening.

For those of you who don’t have time to read my long, sad story of herb failure, I’ll give you the short version: I want to grow my own herbs to save money, but I don’t get enough natural sunlight in my apartment or on my balcony to sustain them. Does anyone have any inexpensive tips for indoor gardening without natural light?

I’ve heard that fluorescent lights work, but I’m not sure how to set something like that up. I’m willing to invest SOME money in this if it will work long term and solve the problem, but absolutely no more than $100.

Thanks to anyone who can help me with this dilemma!

Menu Plan Monday & Weekly grocery round up

Woo hoo! We stayed within our budget this week!! Our grand total was $57! It seems like it was easier this week, too. I felt like we were buying a lot of extra stuff (the hubby has been missing snacks, so we picked up some crackers and pretzels even though they’re not technically part of a meal). We also bought the ingredients for homemade ice cream for a special Labor Day treat. Even with all those extras, we made it!

Thanks again to everyone who offered tips and advice! :)

And now on to the meal plan for this week:

Sunday: Chicken and broccoli stir fry
Monday: Burgers and oven fries (in honor of Labor Day!)
Tuesday: Leftovers/sandwiches
Wednesday: Pasta with meat sauce
Thursday: BLT sandwiches
Friday: Homemade pizza

For breakfast we bought cereal and eggs. Lunches will be leftovers, salads, and sandwiches, as usual. We decided to keep things very simple this week. I’m sure that’s part of why it was easy to stay within budget. But hey, I’m all about simplicity!

Be sure to check out more meal plans at www.orgjunkie.com!

I’m an herb killer

A few people commented on my last post that we could save money on fresh herbs by growing our own. This is something that I’ve desperately wanted to do forever.

Last year, we tried to grow an herb garden from seeds. It didn’t really work, like, at all.

Then a friend gave us some beautiful pre-potted herbs that were already thriving. I put them on our porch in the best sunlight I could find and lovingly cared for them. What resulted is the saddest, most pathetic herb garden ever.

That used to be a beautiful herb garden with basil, parsley, rosemary, mint, and sage until I committed herbicide. The worst part? I so badly wanted them to grow that I continued to water those plant skeletons for weeks after they died. It was beyond morbid.

They’ve been gone for two months now, but I can’t bear to dump them because I’m convinced they’ll somehow magically come back to life. I know, I’m sick. I just can’t face the awful thing I’ve done.

I want to try to replant some seeds, but I’m afraid we just don’t have good growing conditions here. Our apartment is surrounded by enormous pine trees and very little sunlight gets through. We’re also facing north with no south-facing windows. We get no direct sunlight inside and almost none on our balcony. Even the pot of impatiens I hung from our balcony (a flower my mother swore would thrive in the shade) died.

I’m telling myself that it’s the bad growing conditions because I just can’t face the fact that I’m a plant killer.

We’re probably going to be living in this apartment for another two years. I either have to figure out a way to grow some herbs in the shade, or I have to live with paying $3 a week for fresh basil. Bummer.

I promise you, though. If I can’t make it work here, good garden space will be a top priority for me in our next home, even if it’s just a window box.

In the meantime, can anybody help me?! Any tips/suggestions for growing herbs in the shade? Should I just give up?

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Grocery round-up a day late & Menu Plan Monday a day early

Here’s our menu for the week:

Sunday: Vegetarian chili (a new recipe with lots of veggies and beans)
Monday: Chicken quesadillas
Tuesday: Leftovers/sandwiches (Tony is in class late on Tuesdays, so this will be our new standard)
Wednesday: Pesto pasta
Thursday: Chicken wraps with roasted potatoes
Friday: Homemade pizza

Be sure to visit orgjunkie.com for more inspiration for your own weekly menu plan!

As you may recall from last week, we’ve been working hard to make some serious cuts to our $90/week grocery bills. After reading the great advice of the people who left comments, I took an honest look at our grocery spending. I realized we’d been throwing a lot of unnecessary stuff into the cart that was really adding up.

Things like fruit, yogurt, and juice may not be packaged snack foods, but they were still driving up our grocery total without contributing to actual meals. The worst part is, we usually end up throwing away at least some of the fruit because we don’t eat it all before it goes bad. Dumb.

Because those things are healthy and I’d like to keep them in our diets, I’m going to gradually work some of them back into the budget once we get our spending under control. In order to find a happy balance, I think it’s necessary to restrict ourselves to only the necessities for a while. Once we get into the range where we’d like to be, we can add some fruit or juice if it’s on sale. We were buying too many of those items regularly, though, and paying too much for them most of the time.

This week we made a serious effort to avoid buying anything that wasn’t an actual ingredient in a meal. It worked! Well, at least we got as close to success as we’ve even been.

I was amazed at how empty our cart was with only meal ingredients in it! I had no idea we were buying so much extra stuff, but we must have been because our cart is usually stuffed to the brim. This week it was practically bare.

The grand total was $67.66. Still $7.66 above my absolute maximum goal, but I’m cutting myself some slack because we had to buy olive oil this week (a staple that we use in most meals). One bottle should last a couple months, and we bought the store brand at only $6 for a huge bottle.

We stuck to our list except for one item. We weren’t due to buy chicken breasts for another couple weeks, but I saw a single 3.5 pound package of boneless, skinless breasts on special for $1.99 a pound. That’s the cheapest I’ve ever seen them, so I went ahead and bought the package to freeze.

Without the olive oil and chicken breasts, my total would have been $53, which is right where I’d like our average to be. Tony, ever the rain cloud over my parade [kidding, kind of :)], was quick to remind me that it’s not wise to think of the olive oil and chicken breasts as “extra” purchases outside of the budget since we typically need to pick up at least one high-priced staple each week, whether it’s bulk meat, olive oil, mozzarella cheese, or coffee. I agree with him; our weekly budget should have room for these items.

The good news is we learned a few things this week that should help us get closer to our goal in the future.

For starters, one of my strategies was to cut down on meat dishes. We tried to do that this week by adding vegetarian chili and pesto to the menu. Now I’m looking at my receipt and really looking at the costs of those meals. Expensive items like red pepper, jalapenos and three separate cans of beans drove the cost of the chili up despite the fact that it’s vegetarian. For the pesto, our recipe calls for fresh basil, fresh parsley and pine nuts. All three of those items are pricier than a cheap cut of meat.

My new strategy is to limit ourselves to only one fancy vegetarian meal with gourmet ingredients per week, if any. Homemade pizza is always cheap and meatless, so that will remain a staple. For the third vegetarian meal, we’ll find some cheaper recipe ideas in the future.

After reading some of the great advice on last week’s post (thanks to everyone who chipped in!), I also decided to include a leftovers/sandwiches night to our weekly menu. It works perfectly for us. Now that school is back in session, Tony is teaching and taking classes again. Tuesday is his late night with classes until 9 p.m. and no time in between to come home for dinner, so he’ll either bring something to campus with him or eat when he gets home. That leaves me home alone to rummage around for something to eat. :)

Despite the fact that we still didn’t reach our goal this week, I’m feeling optimistic. At least we’re moving in the right direction, and I can see a few minor tweaks that we can make to get even closer in the future. This is a slow process, and I’m just happy to be on the right track!

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