Week 1

So my adventure of meal planning starts with this week.  To give you, my readers, some background, we moved in with my parents and sister in June 2011.  We did so because we moved across the country to be closer to family.  However, when you throw 5 adults in one house, meals can, well... become disastrous! No one knows what they want.  No one has any idea who's going to cook and when.  So my mother suggested I do a meal plan. Me? Plan meals? Oh boy! I decided to accept this challenge.  I researched templates for meal planning and grocery lists to not over do it.  After all, we're on a budget.  Who isn't?


To make things a bit easier, my parents and my husband and I are splitting the groceries.  My parents will get more of the bulk items, and we'll get more of the fresh items.  Well, that's the plan for now anyways.  Trial and error, right?


To begin with, I bough cookbooks on sale at Borders since they were going out of business since all of my cookbook are in storage.  Then, I proceeded to get little stickies of different colors.  I had anyone who would participate choose a sticky color and start sticking them on recipes that sounded good to them.  Even if someone else stickied a recipe I wanted another person to do so as well if they wanted to try it.  This way, I could see the more popular choices.  My reasoning for going through the cookbooks was so we stop eating the same things over and over and get more variety in our diets.  That's healthier anyways.


Then, I created a meal plan.  Right now, I'm only doing dinners.  This works for our family because that's when we're most often all together.  I don't want to cook every night so I threw in a leftover/free for all day.  I picked some easy recipes I already knew how to do like spaghetti, chili, and pot roast.  Then I went through recipes and added some of those.  I actually printed off some recipes from Best Foods that look pretty yummy.  I'm only planning desserts for 1, maybe 2 nights a weeks.


I went shopping today with my list and stuck to it.  I came out just a few cents over my $43 budget.  Mind you, some of what I purchased I can use several times.  But this budget included herbs, canned goods, etc.


I will post examples later.


For now... this is the beginning of my meal planning journey.


So come cook with me!