Then if it was a success I would share it with you. So at the beginning of the year, I decided to see how Frugal Real Food Meal Plans worked for my family. Secondly, I hoped to find a meal plan that I could point my readers to so that they could eat healthy on a limited food budget, too. Although they are frugal and healthy, I was pretty eager to incorporate some new recipes and foods into our menu. My hope with Frugal Real Food Meal Plans was two-fold:įor my family, I hoped that this meal plan would help us get out of the rut of eating the same meals that I have been cooking from scratch for years. The shopping lists and prep lists were already made.The plan uses real foods (not processed foods).A $330 monthly grocery budget was pretty close to our normal food budget. I was really curious for several reasons: Enter Frugal Real Food Meal PlansĮarlier this year, I found a menu plan called Frugal Real Food Meal Plans. Unfortunately, my substituting essentially turns the fresh new recipe into something that looks and tastes just like one of our trusty regular recipes. Fortunately, living in the boonies without access to a store nearby has taught me to be pretty resourceful at substituting and tweaking. Since I don’t plan meals far enough in advance, I don’t usually have the right ingredients on hand when I get a creative twitch and I turn to Pinterest to find some fresh recipes. That’s fine when I’m making the same ol’ meals I usually make, but it becomes a problem when I get in a recipe rut and start craving something new. I have cooked from scratch for so long that I often lay aside menu planning and fly by the seat of my pants. I sometimes do our monthly shopping trip without a list and still stay under budget most months. I am a well-oiled machine when it comes to frugal grocery shopping. But fortunately for our budget, we live much too far from any form of take-out to ever have that as a fallback. Honestly, on my own, I’m not very good at meal planning. I’ve shared some of our favorite frugal meals here and there, but that alone didn’t seem to really be enough to help anyone get a handle on their own grocery budget. I sure don’t feel qualified to share my own meal plans with you. A menu will also seriously reduce the chance of resorting to fast food or take-out. You’ll prevent having to run out just for one thing (which usually turns into one cart full of things). If you know what you’ll be eating for a week or more at a time, then you can get all the groceries at once. One of the best ways to spend less on groceries is to make a detailed meal plan and stick to it. You can eat real, whole foods on a pretty tight budget. Healthy foods don’t have to be expensive. If you think eating ramen and frozen burritos is the only way to reduce your grocery budget, think again. Maybe you really want to lower your grocery budget, but you’re convinced you can’t eat healthy on so little. Lots of people don’t pay attention until they start budgeting. Do you know how much you spend each month on food? Adding up the total amount you spend on food each month can be a rude awakening! All the little trips to pick up this or that accumulate and then you wonder where all the money went.
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