Meal Plan for the Week

 

One of my recent blog finds is Life as Mom.  I love her menu plans! I love to see what she is serving for HER family of 8!  Since that is one of my all time favorite posts from her I thought you all might enjoy the same from me.  :-)

I like to plan my meals about a week in advance.  I have done as far ahead as a month, but in my current life stage planning a month ahead just feels impossible!

 

I plan my meals in 3 steps:

1. Check the fridge for foods that need to be used up.

2. Check the pantry and freezer for foods on hand.

3. Check my lists of meals for ideas and make a list of meals for the week.

Pretty simple really.  I usually use what ever I have on hand, I don’t like to have to buy ingredients special for a meal.  The hardest part for me is thinking about side dishes!

 

Here is my meal plan for this week:

* Beans and Rice with lettuce, tomatoes, olives, cheese, green peppers and sour cream for toppings.  Fruit Salad.

* Salsa Verde Beef served in tortillas with lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and sour cream.  I don’t make side dishes with this kind of meal anymore because my family doesn’t eat them!

* BBQ Chicken, steamed vegies, cut fruit.

* Easy Manicotti (ie: recipe made up as I go!), green salad, fruit salad.

* Homemade Pizza, green salad.

*Snacky Dinner (bread, cheese, fruit, vegies) – A meal in one so to speak!

* Shrimp!  A special treat from the freezer that I forgot I had!  Green salad.  Or this might end up being smoothies, depending on how busy the day is, ha!

What’s on YOUR menu this week?

I CAN make breakfast!

As you might remember from my posts about our menus, I have always said that I CAN'T make breakfast.  Well, I have to admit, this is not entirely true.  I CAN make breakfast, I just struggle with it.

A lot.

In the past two months we have been struggling with finances (so what else is new?!?), enough so that we have only been able to pay ourselves enough to cover bills, gas, and minimal groceries.  (Good thing I'm good at budgeting and planning ahead for expenses, but that's a subject for another time.)  Anyhow, cold cereal was simply NOT an option for February or March.  So, I have had to make breakfast.  Good thing we are self employed since the first week or so it was nearly 9 a.m. before I could get breakfast around!  I'm getting better now, and can have it around by 8.  Mark likes to leave for work between 8:20 and 8:30, so this just gives him time to eat.  In the past month I've made for breakfast (some multiple times):

Oatmeal
Baked Oatmeal
Maple Polenta
Cornmeal Mush (no, not the same as polenta, similar, but not the same)
Grits, Toast, and Bacon
Cream of Wheat
Rice with milk, raisins and sugar
Toast and Juice
Biscuits
Muffins
Pancakes
Waffles
French Toast
Scrambled Eggs and Toast
Fried Eggs and Toast
Bagels and Cream Cheese
English Muffin Melts (tried this recipe from Pioneer Woman blog, it was not good, don't try it, you will be disappointed!)
Biscuits and Egg Gravy
Fruit
Peach Cobbler
Cornbread
Crepes
French Breakfast Puffs
Doughnuts (this was our one special treat, store bought!)

It's been nice to have so much variety!  We have mostly been eating from our pantry, I've only bought perishable things like fruit, vegies, and dairy products. I'm so glad I had a full pantry to eat from!

I guess the lesson that can be learned from this is, never say you CAN'T do something, because that thing will probably happen!

A weeks worth of meals

I thought some of you out there might be interested in knowing how I cook for our family. 

And I didn't have anything better to post about, but we don't need to mention that...

Anyway...

First off, a bit of background info. 
1.)  I have a Very limited grocery budget, $340.00 for the month for our family of 7.  This is all our family can afford right now.  However, thanks to the wonderful training from my mom when I was growing up, I'm able to make this work. 

2.)  We are not on any government assistance at all.  We have received benefits from WIC in the past, but I'm not comfortable with the amount of influence they want to have in our life and for that reason we have stopped receiving it.  But, I do occasionally visit a local food panty when a month is really tight.

3.)  Due to our budget restrictions, I don't buy organic, or even "all natural" unless those things come up on sale for a GREAT price.  I have had to come to grips with the fact that it is more important for my family to have enough to eat over not enough but organic.  Please understand that I am not saying that I have a problem with organic anything, it is simply not an option for us at this time.

All that said, here are the pictures of our weeks worth of meals.

Wednesday :  We decided to use some of the coupons that the kids earned from the summer reading program to go out for dinner.  There was only one problem with our plan, the restaurant that we chose to go to was no longer accepting the coupons even though they weren't expired!  "Note to self, call to confirm restaurant is accepting coupons before going!"  Our local Del Taco was having a special, 29 cent taco's, so we went there for dinner.  We don't normally go out to dinner so this was a GREAT treat!

Thursday:  Spaghetti, fruit salad (made with all the bits and pieces leftover from other meals), bread and butter, and a green salad.  And water to drink.  We drink water with almost all our meals.  No dessert, we are trying to cut back on the sweets.

Friday:  Pizza.  I didn't get a picture of this but you're not missing anything.  I didn't get to make my normal homemade pizza because we had company stop by right as I was getting ready to start the dough and by the time they left it was too late to make homemade pizza.  Thank goodness for Little Caesars $5 pizza!

Saturday:  I usually do a "smorgasbord" meal on Saturday, aka: leftovers!  This is a great way to make sure all the little odds and ends in the fridge get eaten up!  Also forgot to get a picture of this.  Obviously I'm not the best at planning out my blog posts!

Sunday:  On Sunday evenings we always have tea.  So, menu: tea, crackers, tomato slices, cucumber slices, and pizza bites.  Sometimes I will make scones but this was not one of those times.

Monday:  Cheese tortellini with spaghetti sauce, green salad, cantaloupe.  I'm sure you're seeing a pattern here...  We use up what we have on hand, it's one of the great secrets to making a budget work!

Tuesday:  A real winner, hot dogs and watermelon!  I spent most of the day shopping and by the time we got home at 6:15 I just wanted to get something on the table and get it over with.  Yet again, forgot to get a picture.

On second thought maybe I shouldn't post this after all.  It was quite an atypical week, I forgot to take pictures, I want to impress you all with how well we eat, etc., but... well, I guess I'll post this anyways.  :-)  

Hope you all enjoyed this little peak into our life, if you have any questions about anything feel free to leave a comment and I will try to get back with you!  :-)

How I freeze strawberries

I have seen several "how-to" blog posts around and thought I would share one of my own.  This past week my mom picked up 8lbs of strawberries for me for $1 a pound, a great deal here!  This is what I did with all those berries to keep them from going bad.


 The first think I did was dump them in a sink full of cold water to wash off all the dirt.  I just left them floating in the water.

Then I went through them while still in the sink and sorted out all the moldy berries.  You could probably cut off the mold and use the rest of the berry but that makes me a bit uncomfortable so I just throw out the "bad"ones.  You can also pull out the soft berries and use them to make jam or some other thing but I just cut them up along with the rest of them.

 Then I took the remaining good berries and cut them up.  First I cut off the green top...

and threw it into a bowl that I had handy for all the moldy berries and green tops.  This is much easier than making a trip to the trash can after cutting every berry and less messy than just having the trash can next to you. 

Then take the berries and slice them.

I cut up 8 cups of strawberries, then added 1 cup sugar.

Stirred it in well...

And packaged it up in small freezer bags in 2 cup portions.  Make sure to label your bags!  Once in the freezer everything starts to look the same and it can be hard to guess what it is and how long it's been in there.

Lay these bags out flat on the shelf of your freezer and when frozen stack up.  If you just stick the stack of bags in your freezer they stick together, not fun.

These bags of strawberries can be substituted in any recipe that calls for a bag of frozen strawberries.  A word of warning: these are somewhat mushy when thawed so don't expect to eat them plain!

I have never frozen them without the sugar, if any of you have let me know how it worked!  :-)

A BIG Thank you to my Mom for teaching me how to do this when I was growing up and for always showing me how to live frugally! 

And finally, here is the recipe:

Freezing Strawberries

8 cups strawberries

1 cup sugar

Wash all your berries and sort out the moldy ones.  Cut off the green tops.  Slice your berries.  Add sugar; stir.  Package up in 2 cup portions in freezer bags.  Freeze.  Good for 1 year.

Good Friday

We started out the day on Good Friday by making a red velvet cake! Yum!!! It was for Easter, but I wanted to make it ahead of time because we were planning to be gone most of the day Saturday.  The kids had so much fun licking the beaters!

 We went out to my parents house in the afternoon to celebrate with them.  My mom had almost everything all ready and we had a good time just hanging out.  :-)

At about 4 I helped my mom make grebble.  Perhaps you don't know what grebble is?  A little background might be helpful: my mom is 100% german and her grandparents came to America in the early 1900's.  It is a german tradition to have snitz soup and grebble on Good Friday.  Grebble is sort of like a donut but also like bread, deep fried.  And what, you may ask, is snitz soup?  Simply dried fruit, cream, butter, and allspice made into a soup.  I like it a lot but Mark thinks its not so good.  It must be an aquired taste...

Valentine's Day

For Valentine's Day we had a pretty normal day.  During school time we made valentines for each other.  The kids made one for each of their siblings and me and two for Mark, I guess we know who they love more!  For dinner we set the table with our very best china and used a red tablecloth.  Mark bought me flowers for our centerpiece and we had a red candle burning.  Our menu was :
         Heart shaped meatloaf
         Pink Mashed Potates
         Green Salad with tomato slices cut in the shape of hearts
         Red jello
         Fruit Punch
         Pineapple Pie, I died the filling pink with food coloring

Our table, set and ready to go, with everyone's valentines on their plates.

Pink Mashed Potatoes, they look more like frosting!

It looked so festive!  And, as Mark said at the end of the meal, "Everything was great Betsy, and we just got our years worth of food coloring in one sitting!"

Cooking Fun!

After reading a friend's blog about allowing her kids to cook, I decided to give some of my kiddos a chance to cook too.  Elijah was the first one to give it a try, I let him make corn muffins from a box mix.  He had a great time and required minimal supervision since he can read!  They turned out really good and he was soooo proud of himself!

Carrots!

I was given 15 lbs of baby carrots that were close to their expiration date. They are a great blessing but I wasn't sure what to DO with that many carrots. I spent some time online and found out how to freeze carrots. Then I spent all afternoon Saturday chopping, blanching and packing up my carrots. It is such a good feeling to get them all done and know that they are there in my freezer when I need them.