One of my goals for the new year is to meal plan and cut down on our food bill. One of my favorite ways to save some money and make things a lot easier is freezer meals. It takes a little prep sometimes, but being able to just throw something into a pan or toaster oven and have a meal ready to go is really nice. I am setting up a meal plan now for next month but I decided before that to go through everything I have and see what I can make to start stocking up our freezer now. The first thing I grabbed was a bag of potatoes. Potatoes work great for a side or a quick meal. You can add a million different toppings to them to change it up and they are filling. Chili, veggies, cheese, just butter, bacon.... almost anything goes. Makes it a little easier to change things up without having to cook up a bunch of different things. I just wrapped each one up in foil with a little bit of oil and salt and put them in the slow cooker. You could just as easy bake them but we don't have a oven, plus this way you can do it in summer and not heat up your whole house. Once they are done I just left them as is, let them cool, put in freezer bags and tossed them in the freezer. When we decide to eat them I can just put them right into the toaster oven to heat them up, or take them out of the foil into a baking dish and add some toppings and bake that way. You can take them out of the freezer the day before if you want them to heat up quicker too. The next thing I grabbed was some baking mixes I have a small stock pile of. I bought a bunch on sale before our oven broke and just never got around to using them. I decided since one of the easy meals I could have ready for breakfast was pancakes that I could find a way to make that work using the mixes. Since Mallie is allergic to eggs, milk and wheat I subbed pretty much everything for applesauce, bananas and cashew milk. There is a bunch of ideas on how to substitute all of it online and this is just what we had on hand. Plus adding bananas to a banana bread mix seemed like a good idea. I was going to use a griddle to cook everything up but I thought about making the pancakes a little easier for travel since we have to bring food for Mallie just about everywhere we go and pancakes are not that easy. At first I thought how much fun using a cake ball maker would be, but I don't have one. Closet thing I have is a old sandwich maker. It worked perfect. Makes little triangles perfect for little hands and cooks it quick! Once it cooled off I put them in freezer bags and they are ready to go. Each box should be about 5 or 6 breakfasts as is. If I was going to cook up sausage or pair it with fruit I could make it last a bit more. The mixes are pretty cheap too so I think this works out great. I already have the idea to use plain pancake mix and mix it with sausage so its really all in one breakfast. Chocolate chips with the banana bread, brownies because of brownies... Without buying anything for next months meal plan I already have 2 things ready and stocked in the freezer. I bought this dry erase calendar to help keep us on track. It has magnets and sticks right to the fridge so everyone can see it. I have 2 weeks already planed but I'm going to wait to post about all of that until after we go shopping so I can get a better idea on cost. It should be close to $200 for all of this, plus a little to stock up.
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I hope everyone had a great Holiday! <3
The New Year is getting close and I already see a lot of people talking about their goals for the new year. Lots of new ideas floating around to try to have a better year next year. It seems 2015 wasn't the best year for everyone and we are all ready for a better year. The problem with a lot of new year goals is people seem to pick things they just do not do. Things they have never done, tried, wanted to do before. Thats not really a bad thing, but if you are setting goals to try to make yourself do something, its probably the reason why everyone gives up by Valentines day. My goals for the new year I think are pretty simple. Simple as in not impossible or exhausting. I would love to pick the goals of working out every day or being able to run.. at all, but I'm lazy and that seems like torture. Instead I'm going to pick to be more organized. Maybe if I don't feel so scattered all the time I might feel like working out a bit more often instead of just trying to figure out what I need to do next, and how to avoid it... like laundry and dishes. First big thing is the kids room. Thanks to in large part the military and knowing that we would move a lot, and have in the last 6 years, we never really bought storage and furniture that we wanted to hall around with us while moving. Now that we are in a house we will be staying at for awhile we have just about zero storage and organization for the million toys that take over the kids rooms. We have cut down on their toys a lot and donated a ton the last year. (Still have a pile near the door in fact.) Still when you have no shelves and small dressers even a few toys looks like a huge mess. That is the biggest thing I will be working on the beginning of this year. I made a list of cute and practical storage shelves and bins on Amazon and saving up all of the gift cards I earn through Swagbucks and my Louder app to buy them. I should be able to get most of things I want in the next few months *free*. Slowly buying one thing at a time and switching back and forth between the rooms so they both can get worked on at the same time. I would love by the end of the year to not only have it nice and neat, but painted too. Second big goal is money. This one is a common one. Getting a good bit into savings and getting rid of a few bills would help out so much. A big reason why I'm trying so hard to get a lot of the things from goal one for free so its not an added cost while I'm trying to work on this goal. Biggest thing is going to be to meal plan. I've been slacking a bit the last year or so and really need to get back into it. The goal is to spend about $400 a month on groceries. This time around its going to be a bit of a challenge for a few reasons. 1. Food allergies. My daughter Mallie is allergic to Wheat, Eggs, and Milk. Most of the things people count on when trying to make cheap meals. Gluten free noodles, Gluten free breads, dairy free cheese.. make meals twice as much instead of cheap. There is more and more options for her at the store so its not all awful, but most do come at twice the cost. Trying to find meals that everyone can eat together and stay under budget is a little tricky. 2. No oven, No crockpot, no microwave. Yep. There is a lot of cheap freezer meals that are great that you just pop into the crockpot or oven and they are ready to go. Limiting foods to what we can make on a stove top cuts into a lot more ideas then I thought possible. However we have made it work for almost a year now. We do have a toaster oven so its not all impossible, and a large stock pot so much meals you can put in the crockpot work just fine in that on the stove. A microwave to have some quick baked potatoes would be great though. For the most part those are my goals. I would love to slowly start working on my kitchen and getting appliances that work, but that is going to have to come in after the money goal of course. Thankfully we don't owe much so paying things off isn't a huge deal but it leaves us with little left over to really be able to buy the things we need. We also don't want to add any more bills so we would rather just pay cash for the things we need. We have a good plan in place to slowly redo the whole kitchen doing as much work as we can ourselves. It will be slow but I am really excited about how it will look when it is finished. Will make cooking a lot more fun thats for sure! I'm putting together a meal plan for January right now and a grocery list. I will be breaking it down for 2 weeks at a time to make it a bit easier and won't be an issue to switch things up as much. I also plan on slowly working on stocking up on items so after awhile we can cut even more out of our food budget and plan meals a lot easier around what we have. I will come back in a few days to post what I have so far! <3 |
AuthorTrina: Mom, Wife, Person. Archives
August 2017
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