Two-week Menu Plan

Steve and I have been making menu plans for over a year now. There are many reasons we do this:

1. to save money
2. we always have ingredients on hand
3. we don't have to think about what we're having for supper

Before we started making our menus, we realized that we were eating out a lot at the beginning of our marriage. This may not sound bad to some people but we had a very limited budget. I was working full-time. Steve was working part-time while looking for full-time work. We realized we couldn't continue to eat out. We were eating out for a variety of reasons:

1. We were too tired to think of what to cook for supper.
2. If we did think of something, we didn't have the ingredients on hand to make the dish and didn't want to go to the grocery store.

I had read online about making a menu plan and decided to give it a shot. We made a menu plan for one week. I didn't pay attention to the Fareway ad and just wrote down what we wanted to eat and made our grocery list from that. After spending $80 a week on groceries for awhile, I decided that was ridiculous. I think that's when I started the two-week menu plan. I would glance at the Fareway ad but not base my meals around it. It was still cheaper than our weekly grocery list and I started incorporating left-overs and using all (ok, most) of the produce I was buying. Sometime during my menu-planning adventures, I decided to make a menu plan for a month. We would write down 36 meals and then write our grocery list. We would buy all non-perishables and the first two weeks' perishables. The third week we would buy the last two weeks' perishables. This sounds great in theory and as I'm writing this, I'm thinking We should do that again. But I remember why we stopped doing it. It is very hard to sit down and decide what we're going to eat for the next month. It takes a good hour to make the menu plan and then it takes about an hour (more or less) to make the grocery list. It did save time in the long run but we decided to switch back to our two-week menu plan. I've finished writing our menu plan for the next two weeks. I'm pretty excited because it re-uses a lot of ingredients and I'm using my crock-pot at least 5 times. Without further ado, here is my menu plan:

Sunday Dec. 26th

gone

Monday Dec. 27th

grilled cheese, tomato soup

Tuesday Dec 28th Crockpot Day

Crockpot Cheesy Chicken Spaghetti, fruit and veggies

Wednesday Dec. 29th

boneless beef ribs, fruit and veggies

Thursday Dec. 30th Crockpot Day

Ham, Knorr rice side, veggies and fruit

Friday Dec. 31st

Shredded meat sandwiches, veggies and fruit

Saturday Jan. 1st Crockpot Day

Ham and Lentil Soup, veggies and fruit

Sunday Jan. 2nd

Orange Chicken, rice

Hot Ham and Cheese Sandwiches, veggies, fruit

Monday Jan. 3rd Crockpot Day

Three Bean Vegetarian Chili, Texas toast

Tuesday Jan. 4th

left-overs

Wednesday Jan. 5th

ground beef with rice and Rotel tomatoes

Thursday Jan. 6th Crockpot Day

Hodgepodge Sloppy Joes, veggies, fruit

Friday Jan. 7th

Chicken Noodle Soup

Saturday Jan. 8th

left-overs/catch-up meal