Meal planning is a great tool to keep your meals cheap and healthy. How many times have you bough groceries for one night and ended up throwing out the leftover food because you didn't have anything to cook with it? Meal planning gets your organized. For example, if you buy a rotisserie chicken to make tacos with, you can plan to make chicken pot pie the next day with the leftovers. Here are some tips that I found useful when planning a weeks worth of food:
Meal planning tips:
1. When using the vegetables that you bought throughout the week, save the scraps and put them into a vegetable soup.
2. Don't plan to make meals that will require a lot of ingredients that you normally don't use.
3. Buy your chicken in bulk. Whole foods bulk chicken allows you to buy the quality chicken breasts for up to $4 less a pound. Individually freeze the breasts in ziplock bags and you can eat chicken all week!
3. Write your list and shop on the weekend so that you will have time.
4. Cool with healthy, whole grains and buy them in the bull aisle. That way, you can buy as much as you need.
5. Write all your meals down! Write your meals down on the left hand side and your grocery list on the right. That way, you buy exactly what you need. Also, keep your list in the kitchen after you buy the groceries so that you can remember what you are going to make.
Here's an example of my meal planning. This is for this week:
It's all wrinkled from being in my purse while I shopped! I hope this helps with your meal planning!
