November Meal Plan

We are in our third month of working on a monthly meal plan and I finally feel like I am getting the hang of it.  In earlier months, I was always forgetting something.  The first month I totally spaced on what I was going to serve for breakfasts for any of our family.  Then last month, I forgot to plan what Corry, Grace and myself were going to take for lunches.  Overall, this has been going well though.  I feel like I am saving money on groceries overall because I am making less shopping trips, resulting in fewer impulse buys.  Plus, I have been buying produce through a local CSA (review pending) thus reducing our produce bill to $15ish a week. 

As a reminder, I will run through the general steps that I follow to get a monthly meal plan.  I first look at a calendar that has our activities on it to figure out how many meals I will need.  I know that for November, we are camping two times for a total of 5 nights that I will not need to include in my standard meal plan.  I will plan those, but I will do that separately.  Based on where we are in the month and how many meals we are skipping, we need 23 meals for this month.  Then I go through my Pinterest, and my basic list of meals that I know that our family likes and decide what I want to make.  I usually keep it to the favorites and add in a few new recipes.  I also figure out how many meals that I am making to put in the freezer.  Normally I budget about 1-2 meals a week to make and stash in the freezer.  This post will cover the meal plan portion.  I will continue on the next post with the grocery list and how I plan my shopping trip(s). 

November Meal Plan

1. Pinto beans and cornbread
2. Beef chili - we eat ours with fritos and cheese
3. nachos - chips, cheese, jalapenos, beans, and taco meat with extras
4. pulled pork (recipe post to come), pasta side dish and veggie
5. country style pork ribs, mashed potatoes, and veggie
6. Grilled steak and chicken, rice side dish and veggie
7. Baked tacos
8. Stuffed bell pepper casserole
9. salsa chicken & Spanish rice
10. pizza roll ups & garlic cheese bread
11. chicken noodle soup & grilled cheese
12. chicken spaghetti
13. breakfast for dinner - pumpkin pancakes and sausage
14. chicken chili - same as beef chili for fixin's
15. chicken fried rice and egg rolls
16. ravioli with homemade spaghetti sauce & garlic cheese bread
17. beef tips, rice and gravy
18. cheesy chicken and rice
19. baked tacos
20. baked spaghetti (recipe post to come)
21. salsa chicken and Spanish rice
22. nachos
23. Grilled steak and chicken, red beans and rice side dish and veggie

Those are our basic meals.  I also planned this month to make stuffed shells, baked spaghetti, 2 more chicken spaghettis and another round of chicken chili for the freezer. 

Remember that even though my meals are numbered, this is just a list of possibilities for the month and not a day by date mandate.  There are times when I get home and don't want to cook a meal like chicken spaghetti, so I might pick a chicken chili that day.  It seems to work easier and allows us more flexibility on days when the meal that would be listed for that day isn't a possibility.  Recipes that I have available on my blog are linked above and I will be posting more in the days to come. 

What are some items on your meal plan for this week?  If you have any tips or tricks to further simplify this process, please share. 

Monthly Meal Planning - September

I like meal planning.  It gives my type A, list-making personality something to smile about.  I try to help my family stick to a meal plan/meal budget, but we can all do better.  For me, going to the grocery store weekly for a more frequent meal plan is the quick way to financial disaster.  Even at Aldi, there are times when I get out of there $30 over the budget that I came in with.   I got inspired by an awesome woman named Julie (mammaneedsanap) that I follow on Youtube who meal plans by the month, and I am going to give that a go for September. 

Luckily, Corry and I have been stocking up and keeping certain ingredients on hand for months now of foods that we favor, so the shopping trip for this month is not as massive as it would be if we were starting from scratch.  It is not a lie to say that thinking about spending a bulk of our grocery budget in one trip at the beginning of the month is a bit daunting.  I understand that we will still need to shop weekly or so in very small doses for things like milk and our CSA produce, but the vast majority will be purchased in this one day.  I decided to play it safe and stick with mostly meals that we have made before for this first month, however I did throw in a few meals that we have not had previously to test a few new recipes. 

I am not changing the way that I meal plan/build a shopping list/etc; I am just planning for more meals upfront.  I will include recipe links when I have them and will do recipe posts on the ones that I don't have yet.  I will also keep up the practice of not planning a specific meal for a specific day unless we have produce that is going to spoil soon, etc.  We are less likely to stick to a plan, for some reason, if we are "forced" to have a certain food on a certain day. 

Here are our meals for the month:

Salsa Chicken & Spanish Rice x 3
Breakfast Casserole
Grilled Steak & Chicken, grilled sweet corn & fruit salad x 2
Chicken Chili x 2
Spaghetti x 3
Tuna Salad (kids will have something else not decided upon yet) x 2
Baked tacos x 3
Pulled Pork & side dish
Spinach, Alfredo, & turkey pepperoni pizzas
Grilled chicken salads
Sandwich & Homemade Soup (cream of chicken with wild rice & chicken noodle) x 2
Chicken Spaghetti x 2
Red Beans & Rice
BBQ Chicken Sandwiches

I need 28 dinners total for the month of September.  This is technically 25, but I gave us three dinners eating out in case we are out later than expected or feel like a treat.  Most of these recipes are 'diet' and I will include the nutritional info on them in the recipe post if I have it.  If not, I will include the portion(s) that we are having so you can get a general idea.  I need to shop at three different stores to get all of the items that we need - Target, Aldi, and Walmart or Albertsons.  Target's shopping trip was a bit distracted because of diapers, a new skirt for Grace and a few other random items but we did manage to get $10 worth of grocery items.  Aldi was where I spent the bulk of our money and it amounted to $111 and some change, which wasn't bad considering that consisted of a large volume of meat.  I still need a buy 2 items from the list that they don't sell at Aldi and they didn't have for some reason at Target.  All in all, our budget this month for groceries should be less than $200, which is pretty good for a family of five.  Next month that will change because we won't have as many items on hand and we will have a different menu (hopefully).   

Have you ever done a monthly meal plan?  What did or did you not like about it? 

Cheesey Chicken Spaghetti recipe

A few observations for a Sunday:

First, Sunday comes WAY too early in my weekend.  It feels like yesterday was Thursday and here I am back to dreading going back to work tomorrow.  How does this happen? 

Second, Lemonade Vitamin Water Zero rocks my world...until I saw the ingredient list... It's supposed to be a water substitute - why does it have ingredients that I can't pronounce? 

Third, when my children don't get their scheduled naps, being a mom who drinks wine out of a sippy cup and pops pain pills doesn't seem so bad.  Silas missed enough of his normal nap(s) today that he fell asleep during dinner tonight.  Big problem.  Anyone who has had to wake up a child like that knows the Hell and torture that is to come until you can get that child back to sleep.  Luckily, he loves sleep like Corry and I do so he was right back to sleep after his bath and a bottle. 

Today was supposed to be productive.  I had an unstated to do list that was mostly done.  There were several items that had to get done:

1. Section out that bacon and ground beef that I bought yesterday and get that in the freezer.
2. Do at least a few loads of laundry.
3. Make at least one freezer meal. 

Chicken spaghetti it is.  This recipe was adapted from the Pioneer Woman's awesome chicken spaghetti.  Sometimes I will go back and make hers but usually I tweak it to our family's interests.  We have recently discovered roasting our own Poblano chiles and so we include a sizeable amount of those in our adaptation. 

Cheesey Chicken Spaghetti
3 cups cooked spaghetti - broken in half
2 chicken breasts - cooked and cubed
2 cans cream of "something" soup - you can use your favorite mixture of mushroom, cheddar cheese, or chicken)
1 cup chicken broth
1 jar diced pimentos, drained
1 small onion - diced
roasted poblano peppers to taste - we used two whole peppers this time and it was a bit spicy
1.5 tablespoons seasoning salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
salt and pepper to taste
2.5 cups shredded cheese - we Colby Jack but have previously used cheddar/mozarella blend

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 13x9 pan and set aside.
-Cook chicken until done then cube.  We boil on the stove.  Place in large mixing bowl.
-Add salt to same water used to boil chicken and cook broken pasta according to directions on package.  Drain and put in same bowl with the chicken. 
-Add both cans of soup.  Normally we use one cheddar cheese and one cream of chicken but we have also used one cream of mushroom instead of cheddar cheese soup and it turned out great as well. 
-Add your broth, pimentos, onion, peppers, seasoning salt, cayenne, salt, pepper and shredded cheese to the pasta and chicken mixture.  Stir until well combined. 
-Pour into greased 13x9 pan and place in over for 45 minutes or until bubbly around the edges.  Allow to set for at least 5-10 minutes before serving. 

Let me know how you like it!!