Biggest Savings Tip #2- Make a Menu

Make a Menu

It is the universal experience on the internet and in all my saving money books that you save money by meal planning.  That is everyone's experience. This appears to be the #2 biggest savings point there is (#1 in my next post :-))

I wrote up a list of all meals I would like to cook. At first I did this just for supper, but eventually I added the other meals and snacks too. 

Then, following the directions in Sue Greg's cookbooks, I sorted the meals according to themes and assigned a theme to each day (i.e. chicken on Monday, taters and gravy on Tuesday, Mexican on Wednesday, etc).

Taking a calendar-like grid (you could use Excel or Google Spreadsheets or just draw it on a piece of paper), I assigned each meal to a day of the month, (i.e. BBQ ribs on the first Saturday of each month, Stir fry on the third Sunday, Fried chicken on the first Monday, BBQ on the second, Honey orange on the third, potpie on the fourth, etc.). Favorite meals are repeated a couple times. Less favorite meals are assigned at the ends of the month (i.e. If the month has 5 Saturdays, the 5th is chili and cornbread. If there are only 4, we don't have chili that month. It's not liked around here enough to be missed.)

For my family, planning a whole month at once just works best. And I repeat the same menu each month, just adjusting it for vacations and holidays on the first. Going a month between episodes of the same meal is plenty of time to kill monotony. Meals we like more often are just repeated within each month. This means I only really had to do this big job once, though you don't have to be afraid to make mistakes (like putting stew next to chicken and dumplings) because you can always fix it the next month. In fact, I find myself constantly refining and tweaking my plans.

This has not only reduced the "What do I fix for supper!" panic, but has made it so I cook a wider variety of meals throughout the month. I arrange it so the most expensive meals are at the beginning of the month (when I have a bit more money) and the less expensive at the end when we need to have the mortgage payment ready.

And because I know what I'm cooking, I can make meals that take longer to fix, which means I cook more by scratch, which we all know is not only healthier but much cheaper. (I can bake a loaf of 100% whole wheat bread with absolutely no preservatives, sweeteners, or coloring for less than $1. The closest you can buy in the store costs $4+. But baking a loaf of bread takes several hours while running to the store to buy one takes about 20 minutes.)

Breakfast and lunch tend to be more repetitive. Most of us find security in repeating the same breakfast schedule weekly, if not daily. That's OK. Run with it.

One thing to keep in mind when planning is your leftovers (probably the 3rd biggest savings point). We Americans throw away tons of food each- every year. One study said 40% of what we buy goes in the garbage, and not all of that is paper. An alarming amount is actual food.

So when menu planning, plan in what you know will be left over. Making a roast? Plan on bone broth soup, then Stir Fry (cook the rice in the broth),  followed by stew. Four meals for the cost of one roast and some veggies and rice. Knowing I am going to use tonight's leftovers tomorrow allows me to pre-prepare some foods as I put them up for the night, cutting down on cooking time as well as money.

Or freeze your leftovers later for reruns. Lasagna, for example, can freeze well and be eaten a couple weeks later. Many foods can be saved that way from what you might normally throw out. You could even keep a ziploc in the freezer and add 1-2 bites of leftover veggies, gravy, meat, or taters every time you have them to add to a stew or casserole later. When you notice the bag getting full enough, plan stew for some meal the next week. Or just plan on soup for lunch every day, adding each night's leftovers every morning, starting over at the beginning of each week (our grandmas did this).

I used to plan lunch also in the same way as breakfast and supper, but now we just each fix our own individual lunches (now that most everyone is old enough to cook for themselves.) The only rule is "emphasis on leftovers."  Our grocery budget did drop when we changed to this.

You also may want to look over this weeks sales ads and see what is cheapest this week.

• Chicken thighs and legs or whole at less than $1/lb is a good price.
• Pork or chicken white meat at less than $2 is good.
• Beef less than $3.50 good. 

 Kind of adjust your menus to account for these sales.

Having a pre-planned menu allows me to know ahead what all I will need for the next week and reduce my trips to the store. This is a big savings point. You see, every time I set foot in a store I spend at least $20 more than I planned. If I have to run to the store three unplanned times in a week, that automatically adds at least $60 to my budget. By knowing ahead of time what I need, I can keep my trips down to only 1 planned/week (we get paid weekly) costing me no unplanned expenses.

Google Calendar

One day as I began to copy the next month's menu to my paper planner I decided there had to be a better way! I was a bit tired of rewriting the same thing over and over.

I already had a Google Calendar account. They allow you to have as many different calendars as you want and you can turn them off and on as you want. I set up one calendar for my menu. As I entered each meal as an event, I set it to repeat once per month. Wal-la! Instant repeating calendar!

Each month I would sit down and drag and drop to rearrange any meals that needed to be changed due to holidays or vacations. Very quick and simple. I still use this calendar as my base reference.

 

Plan to Eat

This is the online app I use for most of my planning now. This site has 3 sections:

• Recipes
• Planner
• Shopping list

The recipe section can store all your recipes, backed up on the cloud so you will never loose them (and you can drastically reduce the number of paper cookbooks you have to keep on hand. Just copy your favorites out of each into PTE and donate the book to the thrift store). You can also share them, so when my kids leave home I will buy them a year's subscription to PTE and share all my recipes with them.

PTE has a widget you can add to your toolbar that allows you to add any recipe you run across to your own account. Reading a blog with a yummy sounding recipe? Just click the widget, a popup opens, make sure it copied correctly (it usually does but once in a while the computer can't actually tell what is an ingredient and what isn't), and hit save. Now it's in your recipe book.

You can add notes to each recipe to remind yourself of tasks to do ahead of time (i.e. "Take the chicken out of the freezer." These notes will appear in the "note" section of the planner on the day before and can be set to link with Google calendar and send you a notice to remind you.

The planner section is a calendar that you can set to show either weekly or monthly views, and you can choose which day of the week you want it to start (I like to shop on Thursday mornings, so my week starts on Friday). Then, just drag and drop the recipes you want to use from the sidebar (recipe list) on the left to the meal you want it on (any new recipes appear at the top of the recipe list). You can change the size of the recipe by opening it and changing the number of servings. The computer automatically does the math to make it the amount of each ingredient you need.

You can add notes, too, on each day, such as "eat out," or "Bob coming over to dinner." (For readers who attend our church, you each have your own note on every "Sunday lunch" to which I add what you tell me you are bringing. This way I can get a good idea what I need to add to complete the meal.)

If you want to, you can copy one week's or month's planner to another week or month. So you can have your repeating menu.

And every time you drop a recipe (or add an ingredient freehand, such as "cereal") all the ingredients are automatically added to the third section of the site: Shopping List.

The Shopping List automatically sorts things according to department (though it needs a bit of teaching sometimes. I only buy frozen green beans for example. It took a couple of lists for it to get the idea when I add green beans to a menu I want it listed in the frozen food section instead of the canned food section.)

You can set up your list to sort items according to what stores you shop at (i.e. meat and produce go to the Smiths list, canned food to the Walmart list). However, I usually only go to one store a week, varying it according to what I need that week. So I set my list up to sort according to child. My oldest, for example, takes care of everything in the fridge. So I fixed it so anything that goes in the fridge goes to the "store" named "Joy." Canned foods go to the "store" named "Jackie." etc.

The shopping list automatically adds together each item with the same term. So, one glance tells me how many pounds of hamburger, meals worth of bacon, tomatoes, and pounds of potatoes I need to pick up. I used to get lost counting all that up on Google calendar. I would get half way through counting pounds of hamburger and loose count and have to start over. PTE doesn't do that.

You do have to go through and make all the terms the same. For example, hamburger can also be listed as ground beef and ground chuck. My Hubby doesn't like ground turkey, so if I want to use a recipe that calls for that I just change it to say hamburger, too. I also simplify any recipe that says things like "sea salt," to just say "salt." I only use sea salt so any other term is a redundancy and a place for me to make a typo.

This has SO simplified my meal planning and shopping list! I highly recommend it!

And cost? $40 a year. Or, if you catch a sale like I did last Black Friday, $20/year. WELL worth it!

If you use this button, you get a 30 day free trial and I get a 20% commission when you do pay. I would give you the link without the commission, but every little bit helps my family, right?


Next time we will talk about making shopping lists. This is the #1 savings act you can do.

Meanwhile, why not make your own meal list and menu?