Monthly Freezer Meal Planning Part 1

Hello and Welcome!

This week I am going to start a 3 part series on monthly freezer meal planning. I used to do this every couple months before my family had to move to an apartment for a year to financially prepare for me to stay at home full time. I have been a pretty intense budgeter for a few years now. Even more so once my son was born (baby #3) and I quit working full time. I transitioned to a part time position where I worked 5 am to 9 am, 5 days a week. It was torture, especially with a 6 week old that doesn't sleep. Thankfully in December of 2014, I was able to be a full time stay at home mom (SAHM). Then, like an addict, I found a part time job to do from home. I don't think I know how to not work. Anyway, a year and a half later, another kiddo on the way and in a small house I had the inspiration to start up monthly meal planning again. Living by the pay periods has caused me to meal plan every 2 weeks (ish) anyway. This baby however, has given me an intense paranoia that I will go into labor and there will be no food for my other kids because I'm due around the mid-month pay period. Silly, I know, because I have awesome people who would never let my kids starve and would run to the store for me. But paranoia, especially preggo paranoia can be a strong emotion. It keeps you up a night. It also causes you to spend 13 hours making 30 dinners, 17 lunches and 3 dozen muffins. Oh yes, you read that right.

While we aren't exclusively living on these meals for the next 30 days, I am using this stuff to supplement my usual menu planning to allow me to focus on other projects that creep up on the nesting to do list (like re-organizing my laundry room). Thankfully we have all the major furniture covered and many of our toys and activity playsets have survived 3 kids.

Let me say, I have a culinary background. I worked as a line cook for 5 years and know my way around a kitchen and recipe book. I do still think that anyone can monthly meal plan. Cooking days like this can easily be scaled back to 3 or 4 hours (not 10) and you'd get away with 15 meals or so.

Some books gave me the original inspiration for monthly freezer meals.

1. Miserly Moms
2. Don't Panic-Dinner's in the freezer

I have also been previously inspired by sites like Monthly Freezer Meals on Facebook and a few friends of mine.

The first task to hurdle when meal planning is figuring out what you want to cook. I usually include several meals what use similar ingredients. A couple pasta dishes, a few tex-mex inspired dishes and a few casseroles. I will also try to incorporate meat that is less expensive cuts or can be used in all the dishes, ex: ground beef, chicken tenderloins, ground turkey. Then using Pinterest boards I've made or cook books I have (or recipes in my head) I decide the meals I am going to make and about how many I want to get.

Some of these are staples in our house and some are new.

Then I make a grocery list, inspecting my pantry before adding anything. I also added my usual 2 week menu plan since I wasn't going to be exclusively using this list for our menu. I took the time to group the bigger list by aisle at the grocery store to easy my trip. 

The total trip for the planned 31 freezer meals, 12 weekly meals, lunches and breakfast cost me $340 using exclusively Winco and Costco. We had to rearrange our budget to make this work but it will make things so much easier in the long run.

I learned a few things this trip,

1. I am not taking my kids for this level of shopping again. (I'd rather go at midnight)
2. I overbought on things like pasta (I was rusty with my amounts for this kind of volume)
3. I need to find a few more vegetarian ideas to help make more meals stretch for less $.

I will be back in a few days to go over the cooking day and freezer storage. I'd be happy to answer any questions on menu planning and hope that you all enjoy this post!