a month's worth of organization

As you know I've gotten pretty good at planning meals a week in advance--coming up with a menu and grocery list on Mondays, doing the shopping, and then doing the whole process again the next week. I like having everything on hand to do all the cooking for the week and while I usually have to do one random trip to a store later in the week for something I forgot, it's worked pretty well. I don't feel like our food budget is any smaller though, by doing this planning, and I think it's because I can't really shop sales and store anything. It's cheaper buying some things in bulk, and it's cheaper buying a couple of a much-used item when they are on sale, but I had no where to store anything, so I couldn't do that. Until this week =)

Thanks to my spurt of organizational energy on Tuesday, I was able to create enough "pantry space" to allow this to happen. I decided to put in some time Tuesday night and create a menu for the next 4 weeks, from now until we leave for Christmas break. Then I made a grocery list for the month--one section was stuff I was going to use several times that I could buy at Costco (shredded cheese--which freezes pretty well in plastic baggies by the way, chicken breasts, ground beef, tortillas--which also freeze if you defrost them in the fridge before you use them etc). One section of the list was stuff I would buy at a normal grocery store because I only needed a couple of each item, not a costco sized amount, but they were things I could buy all at once so I wouldn't have to go back each week. And then I made a smaller grocery list for each week of perishables. I figured out what produce my recipes for that week would call for and put them under that week's heading. So yesterday I borrowed the Costco card that Fuller has available to students and went to see what I could find. I did great--didn't buy anything that wasn't on my original list and managed to get all the staples I needed for a month's worth of meals for $120. A quick trip to Albertsons on the way home where I spent another $20 on some canned staples and my kitchen is now stocked with everything I need for the next month! I am VERY proud of myself for doing so much advanced planning and am super excited to see how this works out. I'll have to replace things like milk, lunch meat, and produce each week, but at our local farmer's market I can do all that for about $15 a week.

One of the things I did was choose a few main recipes that I'll repeat thorughout the month because that way I could buy the ingredients all at once and know that I'll go through them. So for instance, this next month we're doing Chili twice, Chicken Azteca twice, Enchilada Casserole twice, and a pesto chicken pasta twice. Then each week I'll substitute in a couple different homemade salad recipes for variety. I was talking with a friend about how it really is cheaper if you have a set repertoire of meals that you remake a lot, so you can buy ingredients in bulk, but I was saying that I couldn't commit to that quite yet, I'm enjoying experimenting and playing too much! So I at least figured that I could commit to a set of meals for a month, and then next month will pick a few other meals to make my "staples" for that month so I still have enough variety to keep me interested in cooking but will re-make the recipes to help with the grocery budget :) I spent part of my time at Megan's last weekend copying recipes out of her amazing salad recipe book, a HUGE book of all salads and homemade dressings, so I am VERY excited to mix some of those in with our staple meals--especially because produce is so cheap for us!

I'll keep ya posted to see how it goes, but I am pretty darn proud of myself this week :)