My Memphis Mommy: Meal Planning for January

January 01, 2011

Meal Planning for January

Cooking can be daunting, coming up with ideas and finding dishes that your whole family will eat and are healthy and affordable is challenging! So I hope by sharing what meals I am making for my family on our budget this will be of help to you! Please give me feed-back! E-mail Shana: mymemphismommy@gmail.com. If you have any recipes you would like to share, I would love to see them!

A "resolution" that I have is to post my menu plan! What I will do is give you a link to my menu and post the recipes, or links to where I got the recipes and when I find "awesome" prices, I will post a meal price break-down! Hopefully you will find this helpful to see how I plan food. This is a system that works well for us, I am a bit of a free spirit so it is virtually impossible for me to completely write down what I am going to eat on what day. But I can know what meals I want to make within the month and have a weekly schedule posted.

Here is January's Menu, but let me explain,
Here is what we do:
On Sunday we focus on worship at church, serving other and spending time as a family, this is my cook as little as possible, day. We usually do Soup and Sandwich Sunday or in the Summer, Salad & Sandwich Sunday or we do left-overs.

Monday is a "big meal day. We usually eat out once a week (on a kid's eat free night) and we have one day for left-overs (Sat.) plus Soup and Sandwich Sunday so that equates to 4-5 days of needing to make a meal.

My husband sometimes will need to travel for a week and he gets "meal money" he is awesome to budget(leaving money for me to eat out on at home) so that when he is gone I eat out with the girls (at a kid's eat free place) 2-3 times. We have one week in January he is gone so I only need 20 meals to make for January.

We tend to eat Italian weekly, Asian weekly, and Mexican weekly. I do not eat any beef and eat very little pork, with being pregnant I am staying away from soft cheeses as much as possible and most sea food (but I LOVE SEA FOOD). I also love lamb but it is expensive and hard to find! So yes we eat a lot of Chicken and Turkey!

The soups I am planning to do as this Sunday will be a left-over day, that leaves 3 more Sundays,

Home-made Potato soup (can make it the day before)
Progresso Veggie Soup
Campells Butternut Squash Soup (my girls will probably eat Progresso chicken and noodle or Veggie Soup doubt they will eat squash soup)

The other meals I have mapped out the categories then I will just write in the dates, I have all the ingredients on hand for these meals and I have began to make my meal plan for February that way I can shop for the ingredients, so I have a good price for those items! Obviously for the fresh ingredients peppers etc. I buy those the day before. I will try to figure out how to put to links to the recipes in the spread sheet. All of the meals are prepared, I do not do FROZEN STORE MADE MEALS. I may have some of my ingredients frozen or be semi-home made (for the chicken pot pie I use a frozen pie crust) but I would not serve a ready made pot pie.

Click here to see January's Menu! Note the menu is for dinner only and it does not include the fruit I will serve the kids which I serve to them at all meals. I always give them either, blueberries, strawberries, apple slices,bananas, raspberries, mandarin oranges, grapes, pineapple or apple sauce. I try to have 4 different fruits on hand to rotate through.