Meal Planning - Part 2

 So last week we focused on just the first few days. I started by talking about what was on sale at my store when I was making this meal plan, and that was ground beef, steak, and pork chops. I planned three meals with ground beef and showed the process I follow to do that. Today before we get started on tackling Breakfast and Snacks I wanted to show that thought finished. Below you will see I added the rest of the week (six days because I take one day each week for leftovers, or life coming up, or just ordering out). I decided on Spaghetti for one night and Maccaroni for the other. (Bonus points if you find the spelling mistake I couldn't edit out.)

You will notice for the Macaroni I have a star beside the cheese. I do this when I don't need this item to make the dish, but if I have it I can use it. So in this case I have shredded cheese on my list, so it will go well with the Maccaroni. If I didn't and it wasn't on sale, it probably wouldn't make my grocery list. This can work for any ingredient, especially if your family can take or leave certain things. And it's a great way to save money and not waste food your family may not eat anyway.

Now we are going to look at some of these blank spots. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And I find if you have meals ready and waiting to eat, you are more apt to grab them, especially on busy days. Personally, I think yogurt parfaits are the way to go. You just grab them on your way out with a spoon and boom, breakfast. My grocery store had a few other sales besides meat, some of them were yogurt, cereal, and milk (buy two boxes of cereal and you get a thing of milk, free), and Tostitos or Doritos. So for breakfast, I went with two days of cereal and two days of yogurt parfait. What I do is add granola to yogurt and top it with berries.

One thing I also love is Eggs. I always grab them on sale or not, because they are so versatile. You can have eggs for breakfast, lunch, or dinner and even a nice hard-boiled egg as a snack. In my house, we usually do Bacon and Eggs, but bacon can be ridiculously expensive sometimes, so a great substitute is fried bologna. Bologna is always cheap, and you get a lot when you buy it. It goes a long way, and even after having it for breakfast with eggs (I wrote two days), you can still use it for sandwiches one day too (either alone or with other cold cuts).

Sometimes Breakfast really turns into Brunch. And that's fine, as you can see one day I didn't write a Lunch. More likely than not I would do this both days for the Eggs and Bologna, but I wanted to show the Bologna Sandwiches. One of the great things about planning meals is that you can fit it to your lifestyle. Don't force breakfast because its written there. If you eat brunch, do brunch. That's totally fine.

Now for snacks. Snacks can be throughout the day or at night. Either way, you want to think them out and know what you're buying. Some nice healthy snacks are Cheese and Cold Meats with Crackers, Salsa and Chips, things like that. And of course some not so healthy snacks every once in a while is fine also.

I think that is it for today. Next week, I will look at sides and finish off this plan.