Hey everyone!! I promised to come back and talk through how I meal plan, but I think I’m going to have to do this meal planning post in two seperate posts to keep from bouncing all over the place and rambling {If you know me, I’m REALLY good at that ;} So here goes..

Here was my haul from this morning’s meal planning/grocery shopping trip! I spent a little under $150 for everything you see here! I got strawberries, blueberries, bananas, apples, pears, mushrooms, carrots, zucchini, lettuce, arugula, broccoli, tomatoes, lemons, limes, cilantro, peppers, mango, oats, 2 18 packs of eggs, whole wheat bread, bagels, Greek yogurt, turkey, organic whole milk and unsweetnened almond milk. Back out the cost of the Starbucks coffee and my donation to the March of Dimes, and I spent roughly $134 on groceries to feed my entire family for the whole week!!

Wanna see how that breaks down?!

At $134 / 7 Days = $19 per day to feed my family of 4 fresh foods!

Now, we eat every meal at home. We rarely go out to eat, however my husband does take customers out to lunch daily so I won’t include him on my even further breakdown…

At $19 per day / 3 meals per day = $6 per meal

Wanna see what that looks like broken down even further?!?!

Breakfast $6 / 4 people = $1.50 PER PERSON for breakfast!!
Lunch $6 / 3 people = $2 PER PERSON for lunch!!
Dinner $6 / 4 people = $1.50 PER PERSON for dinner!!!

{What I failed to mention is that I also got stuff to make homemade marinara sauce, stuff to make meatballs and sausage.
And see, when I make a pot of sauce {what we refer to it as} it lasts my family 6 weeks!! Here’s how:
After the sauce has cooked all day, I transfer it to 6 different containers and stick it in the freezer. Then each Sunday {it’s our Sunday night tradition :} I take out a container of sauce and bam! Dinner is done! All I have to do is decide what I want the sauce to compliment that night. Some nights it’s baked ziti, or pizza, or eggplant parmesan, chicken parmesan, seafood pasta, you get my drift. {Here’s where I begin to ramble ;}}

So, in fact, the cost of everything I use to make sauce, meatballs and sausage is also calculated in the figures above! But, since I didn’t buy any meat at the store today {other than what I used to make meatballs} I figured it was kind of a wash.

Can you believe that I once had a friend tell me that she and her husband went out to eat because they needed SO many groceries that it was actually just cheaper to go out to dinner?!?! Say Whaaaaaat?!?

Meal planning is SO important to me because not only does it give my family money back in our pockets to do other things that we enjoy to do, but we also know every ingredient that we are putting in our and in our children’s mouths AND we’re teaching them healthy habits that they can take with them throughout life! If you ask me, that is winning all around!!!

XO!
Courtney