Saturday, May 28, 2016

Meal plans - 10 days?

I did meal plans this morning.  I'm still on a quest to eat down the pantry and only buy perishables or something I need to replenish.  I am also trying to broaden my skills and use appliances to my best interest in efficiently cooking economical good food.  

First, I took inventory, noting what needed to be eaten quickly.   I incorporated Saturday through next Sunday,    Two of those days, some of us aren't going to be home.  


  • Pizza, green salad 
  • Out to dinner 
  • Pasta in the pressure cooker , salad ( tomatoes and cucumbers ) 
  • Breakfast for dinner - eggs, bacon, muffins ( banana , Greek yogurt from the dollar store) ,fruit 
  • Not refried beans and rice in the pressure  cooker,  taco salad 
  • Sausage, vegetable soup, leftover vegetable bean soup (vegetarians ) 
  • Hot dogs, hamburgers. Salad, fruit 
  • Pulled pork sandwiches. Fruit, potato salad 
  • Pork roast, baked potatoes. Green salad, green beans. 
I found a dinner roll recipe without yeast on Pinterest.    It sounds really good and has the basic ingredients.  As children, my mother always had a stock for certain things on the house so we knew of we wanted to bake, we could pick from a limited number of items.   She would only buy cornflakes or puffed wheat in bags when we were kids.   Imagine her surprise when I found a recipe to make Carmel  (corn?) from puffed wheat.    LOL.  Peanut butter cookies,snickerdoodles, and a blond brownie rounded out our expertise.   She used to buy angel food cake mixes. But that was about all the mixes she bought.   Everything was scratch.   


Groceries on the cheap is looking at the Put Dinner On The Table meal train from a different
 Perspective . The  emphasis is on purchasing good food( shelf- stabll/ freezer staples )at the lowest possible cost and purchasing enough to last you until it goes on sale again -- Keeping a controlled non-perishable stock of the things you use on a regular basis. It means that when you shop, rather than purchasing just what you need for a day or a week, you  buy a loss leader protein, produce you will 
need on sale, a stock item if it's a RBP, and dairy instead.    This allows you to put well balanced meals 
on the table consistently  for a four dollar a day budget per person.   You spend more time on the 
planning and shopping end of the meal train and less on the cooking end by cooking efficiently.    

Four dollars a day is the target amount for people on snap.   My premise is that of you can do it on four dollars a day, spending more isn't hard.   You still get more bang for your buck.    









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