Meal Planning Basics
A How-To Guide on Spending Less and Eating Healthier
Dinner time is often a hectic time. People are just getting off work, coming home from school or after-school activities, catching up on mail, homework, walking the dog, and so forth. Unless you have planned ahead, it is easy to feel a time crunch and run to the store every night to pick up ingredients or, worse yet, to a fast food restaurant.
By taking just one hour a week, you can sit down and plan what the next seven nights of dinners will be, the ingredients you need, plus extras such as breakfast cereals, lunch items if you don't anticipate leftovers, snacks, and household goods. Simply making a shopping list and sticking to it will reduce your time running to the store for items you forgot and reduce your bill for items that you aren't sure if you will need that week.
Getting Started with Meal Planning
At the beginning of the week, such as Sunday or Monday, sit down with your grocery store's flyer and read over the bargain items of the week. Sometimes stores will have meal deals, such as buying spaghetti noodles and jarred sauce means you get a loaf of french bread for free. Also clip out coupons and store them in an organizing pouch. The key with coupons is not to shop off them, but to make your list and then check to see if your coupons match anything you were already planning to buy. And don't forget that store brands are often just as tasty as name brands, but much cheaper.
Planning Ahead with Ingredients
When deciding what meals to make, think about using ingredients from one meal to the next. Some ingredients keep longer than others. For example, if you use half a green pepper, you can always dice the other half and throw it in the freezer for a later meal. But if you buy celery, it does not keep. So if you are not using all of it for one meal, plan other meals that also take this ingredient. The same goes for meats. If you buy a pork tenderloin, you can plan to bake it and use it one night with mashed potatoes and green beans and the next night you can slice it up and put it in stir fry. A good meal planner will never have leftover food that sits around. When you do have foods that you freeze, such as chicken breasts from the week before, it can aid you in coming up with your meal plan for the following week that uses up the chicken breasts or whatever else you have stored in the freezer.
With a little planning, you can limit your trips to the store or to restaurants and help protect your budget and your waistline by planning your weekly meals ahead, getting ingredients at one time, and even denoting which night gets what meal. This will greatly reduce those dinner-time dilemmas.
Make a Plan Before Food Shopping
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