Saturday, April 18, 2009

Our New Experiment

How many times have you gone to prepare a meal, only to realize that you didn't defrost the meat you needed or you had forgotten to pick up some of the ingredients at the store? If you're like us than this has happened countless times. And also, if you're like us, than you'll just hop in your car and drive to the grocery to pick up what you need. If you perform this same routine quite frequently, eventually your pantry, cabinets, refrigerator, and freezer begin to overflow and you run out of room to store everything. I don't know how many times we've gone to the store and brought back something only to find that we already had it and that we had just forgotten about it. Well...no more!

Inspired by another blog that we keep up with, Keeper of the Home, we have decided that we were going to create our menu plan, for the next TWO WEEKS, using only the items that we already have in our kitchen. That means NO trips to the grocery store...except for our "essentials". We consider these to be our milk, eggs, bread, orange juice and of course...Diet Pepsi. If you know us than you realize that we can not function without our Diet Pepsi :)

At first, we didn't think it would be that hard to come up with our menu ideas. When we looked in our cabinets and freezer it seemed that we had plenty to choose from. After sitting down and beginning to make our menu, we realized that this may be a bit more challenging than we had originally anticipated. We came to find that we may be cooking things and creating meals that we may have never thought of.

We're hoping that this little experiment of ours disciplines us and we're also hoping that this will lower our overall cost of groceries.

Breakfasts will consist of cereal, fruit or toast on most weekday mornings. Lunches will be eaten at home or taken to work. Lunches will be sandwiches or leftovers. That is another thing we are working on...eating our leftovers and not letting our food go to waste. We have gotten much better with this.

Here is our dinner menu plan for the next two weeks:

Saturday: Chili Dogs with Mashed Potatoes (Very healthy...we know!!)

Sunday: Turkey Melt Sandwiches with Asparagus

Monday: Eggs and Toast

Tuesday: Vegetable Soup with Cornbread

Wednesday: Chicken Swiss Bake with Green Beans and Corn

Thursday: Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

Friday: Chicken and Corn Chowder Soup with Toast

Saturday: We are cheating this night and going out to dinner but it is for a good reason...we're celebrating our April Birthdays!

Sunday: Cheeseburgers with Homemade Hash browns

Monday: Pancakes ( can you tell we're starting to run out of ideas?!?!)

Tuesday: Chicken Noodle Soup with Toast or some sort of sandwich

Wednesday: Parmesan Crusted Chicken and Peas over Pasta with Light Alfredo Sauce and Garlic Bread

Thursday: Egg Sandwiches

Friday: Taco Night!

Saturday: Ravioli and Asparagus with Garlic Toast

We think we did a pretty good job at making this menu plan. Now let's hope we can stick to it!

4 comments:

  1. way to go... so very wifey of you!

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  2. I also consider Diet Pepsi an essential! :)

    Great job on two weeks of meal planning - I should really give that a shot.

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  3. It's going really well...so far so good. I can already tell that there is less stress...meals are planned in advance and we don't have to worry about going to the store or double checking to make sure we have everything we need. I'm looking forward to clearing out some space in our cabinets!!

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