Our First 2 Week Meal Plan

Since I now follow about a billion awesome blogs, I have seen a few of them do meal plans for their families.  Mostly, 2 week meal plans.  Where they go through their pantries and try to make as many meals out of what they have on hand.  They complete their meal plans by jotting down breakfast-lunch-dinner meals and making a grocery list of all the ingredients they will need to make those meals.  

I was inspired.

So I tried it myself.  2 Sundays ago, I did everything above.  Here's my breakfast and lunch list of things we eat and thing to get:

Then I made a list of all of our dinners that we would be having for 2 straight weeks.

I even threw in 2 new crock pot meals (found here) that I wanted to try.  Friday, we had the Santa Fe chicken meal and it was so so.  Kinda bland.  Probably won't make that again unless I can find a good seasoning to make it more tasty.

I went through each dinner and made sure to add all the ingredients to my list that I needed for those meals.  It was pretty simple and didn't take me long at all.  Roughly 30 minutes.

I have to say the last two weeks went almost perfect.  Tuesday got messed up since Jer traveled that day and didn't get home until after dinner so I made me and Bos something that wasn't on our menu.  Then Sunday was a little wacky since my brother was here and we had lunch with my cousin.

I love it because all I have to do is pull my list out of my kitchen drawer to see what's for dinner that evening.  No thinking involved.  Thinking and me don't get along.

Jer likes it too because he's actually getting something decent for dinner every night.  Typically, I'd forget to pull something out to be thawed so that resulted in either him stopping to get us food or having us scavenge around in our pantry looking for something to make that wouldn't take forever.  Because we are usually starving by then.

Another plus to planning 2 weeks ahead, is.....it allows me to only have to go to the grocery store twice a month which means we save mula!  Instead of 4 times, once every week.  Even though I actually like grocery shopping, this will save us money because I'm less likely to throw unnecessary things in our basket.  Now.....I have a list and I'm on a mission.

Saving money = earlier retirement for Jer.  Win win.

So I give it an A+ and would suggest trying it, too.  :)