Matt’s Month of Meal Planning

Ok, so after many attempts to not write this I have given in and will try to succinctly share the what and how of my adventures in meal planning. Also I’ll pass on the things I learned and problems I faced.

To start things off let me just say that Julie is a superhero! This was quite a bit more difficult than I imagined it would be. For starters just the sheer amount of thinking that feeding a family of six requires is staggering, and not just in the ways that I thought it would be. For the first several days it was fun to be “in charge” of making dinner but I quickly discovered that to have to constantly be thinking about how much time is left before I need to start dinner is exhausting. Secondly she feeds us and supplies all the consumable items (a fact that I did not properly understand at the onset) for only $100 per person. That may sound like a lot to you but let me assure you that it is not. So before we dive into my efforts please hit the care reaction to give her the proper recognition, as she does this all the time is stellar at it. Thanks!

WHAT: I had the benefit of having had Julie streamline our meals already making it much simpler to plan out. Our kids asked to eat sandwiches for lunch all summer so I simply had to have enough peanut butter and jelly/honey to last the week. This did not include Sunday lunch as we usually eat something aside from sandwiches to break it up. We also have certain themes certain nights of the week, like Mexican Tuesday, pizza movie nights on Friday (of which only one is take out), and my parents bless my sister and us every Thursday night by taking us out to dinner. For the most part I stayed within those themes but I did vary some of what we did for dinner but breakfast and lunch we pretty easy to plan because she already had them in a rhythm.

I did take the opportunity to Google some new recipes that had similar ingredients. They ate all the new things but probably would not be upset if all but maybe one or two out of like fifteen ever showed up again. I started with a blank calendar and just filled in all the recipes trying to not run multiple days of similar meals. I then broke down approximately what it would cost up front. So if I had to buy ground beef I would just count the entire cost in the first meal, and then not count the beef in the subsequent ones. I was informed this was an extremely inaccurate way of calculating the individual cost of meals, and while that may be true I was only concerned with staying under the $600 budget.

Once I had the overall meal plan, which had to be tweaked along the way, I would carefully walk through what I needed each week and put it into the grocery cart on our Walmart app. I did this for each of the first three weeks, the final week I had to physically walk into the store because I didn’t have enough budget left to make the $35 minimum to pick up.

HOW: So my strategy (again not realizing that all consumable items; read: shampoo, laundry soap, chicken feed, girl products, trash bags, etc. come out of our $600 grocery budget) was to find meals that used things that I could buy in bulk. For example every Friday is our pizza nights rather than buying three frozen pizzas I bought a massive bag of mozzarella cheese, loads of marinara sauce a packages of yeast and big bag of flour to make multiples out of the initial purchase. I bought a ton the first week rounding out somewhere close to $275 which included trash bags, laundry soap and a couple other things. They had to have two people bring it out and it filled the floor of my minivan.

One of the areas I tried to cut down on was the kids snacks, now don’t read that our kids snack all the time, in realty they get one snack in the afternoon, however they have been becoming a bit more inclined to not follow the rules and eat multiple items. So we made up snack boxes one cold one and one not cold one. They could eat as little or much as they wanted from their boxes but when it was gone it was gone. These worked really well and actually lasted for two weeks. At this point we should have made some more but both my will and my budget were exhausted.

I made a ton of things from scratch; all the pizza crust, breadsticks to go with fettuccini, Stromboli dough, calzones dough, pancake mix, etc. I do think it was cheaper than buying canned pizza dough but in hindsight it might not have been worth the extra time. I used a ton of eggs from our girls in the backyard, because they were free. They helped make tons of things including breakfast casserole, brownies, and other things.

RESULTS: I’ve learned quite a bit having embarked on this task, some of which will seem very simple.

• First off like I said at the beginning handling all of the planning and preparing day in and day out is extremely mentally draining.
• $100 a person for all things is a difficult task. I was just lucky that dog or cat food didn’t fall on my watch.
• I managed to cook every meal but two during August. I work long days on Mondays and a couple of those Julie had to cook. I did schedule easy dinners knowing this was a possibility.
• It was super helpful to be able to put items in the cart and check off the ingredients, that way I kept up with what I needed for the next weeks meals.
• My last week was ridiculously thin, we basically only bought bread for sandwiches, milk and apples.
• The last week on the menu didn’t look like that at all, as I was out of ground beef and had to use the frozen chicken that we had to do a different dinner.
• You can see on the menu that aside from our family dinners on Thursday nights we only ate out twice.  Once after church and once on Friday night for pizza.
• Cooking every night had me very thankful for Thursdays!

LESSONS: Here’s just some random things I learned or noticed.

• I printed off all the new recipes I tried and kept them in a folder along with the menu, so I could look at the menu and then find the menu that I had prepared for.
• If you’re going to try and stay at a budget that’s this tight you have to stick with what you planned you can’t just wing it. I totally understand now why Julie would get frustrated if I ate something that was not on the schedule. J
• I bought six loaves of bread that first week. Six! They were all gone by the time we went back to the store.
• We buy the massive peanut butters, and went through three.
• If your kids are like mine they will roll through some syrup/honey.I bought a massive jug of honey and refilled the already large bottle they use for things. It only cost like three dollars more and lasted all month.
• There’s a difficult balance to being generous and thrifty. When the kids had friends over and offered them fruit, part of me was proud and part of me panicked wondering how were we going to have enough.
• The biggest hit of the snack boxes was the Yogurt Bark, which is basically just frozen fruit chopped up small and frozen in yogurt. Has to be stored in the freezer or it melts all over the rest of the box.
• The homemade granola bars were really good as well but they had to be refrigerated.
• Should have made bark for one box and then granola bars for the next so they could have been stored easier keeping them at the correct temperature.
• The PB&J French toast was weird. Everyone ate it but no one cares to have it again.
• The Breakfast Casserole that had hash browns, eggs, sausage and cheese was the biggest hit and the only thing that there was no left overs.
• The Sausage bites were amazing. I added eggs and might have eaten more than half myself.
• I had to make Saturday lunch be leftover day instead of sandwiches because our leftover shelf was over flowing.

So did I make it under the $600 budget? Not exactly. I wound up spending $601.99. I would say that’s pretty good since I’m pretty sure that nearly $100 was on consumable items that were not food, and dumb me accidentally bought two bags of onions week one and only needed one. Do I want to do it again? Not exactly.Do I appreciate my wife even more and have even greater admiration for what she does? You betcha!