Jon sure loves his nieces!
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Living in downtown Salt Lake means rent is not very cheap. We are so blessed to be able to live right next to Jon's work and to be so close to a lot of really cool places (like Trolley Square), but it also means that we have to make some alterations to our budget. One of those alterations that we decided to make is to decrease our grocery budget. Do you want to uncover your inner creative juices? Lower your grocery budget.
I decided to start out by trying crockpot freezer meals. The first thing that I had to do is find recipes that could easily be thrown into zip lock bags, frozen, and tossed into a crockpot at some point.
Then I created a shopping list and tried to estimate the cost of all of the ingredients. The goal was to be at or under $150 for half of the months worth of freezer meals. I used 11 recipes and each recipe serves between 4-8 people, which means plenty of left overs for lunches and such.
Jon and I went shopping for everything over the weekend. We took a little more time than usual to calculate the estimated price to make sure we stayed under budget. We shopped at Sam's Club for all of the bulk and Smith's for the produce.
After school and some job hunting today I got started prepping the gallon freezer bags. I had already written out the ingredients for each recipe on their own individual bags so it was easy to look at the bag and see what needed to be put inside of it. The most important thing to have is a knife and cutting board, but I also used a few bowls, measuring cups and a nice slicer thing.
I cut everything up by recipe instead of cutting all of the veggies and meat at once. It was easier for me to do it this way, but you can cut up all of the veggies and such before bagging.
I got lucky when Jon came home (it was his first day at his new job! You should congratulate him) and convinced me to take a break and go running with him and I got even luckier when he offered to help cut meat and veggies after.
We have an awesome slicer tool thing that I love (since I finally figured out how to use it today)! It is really sharp and Jon was so speedy slicing away that he sliced his thumb. I was going to post a picture but I figured some people would rather not see blood on a post about food.
After Jon got his owie I finished everything up solo.
Tip for any of you who are wanting to do freezer meals- Make sure you empty your freezer before hand or that you have a big freezer, because these bags will take up a good amount of space.
It feels so good to know that we saved a lot of money, stayed within half of our monthly grocery budget, and will have quick and easy dinner prep. It takes time to prep everything but I am sure that when I throw a bag in the crockpot tomorrow and have several meals ready a few hours later, it will all feel worth it.
Jon will probably be glad that we won't be having beef and vegetable soup for dinner every night.
If anybody has any low budget meal planning, let me know!
Awesome idea!! Did you pin the recipes? We've been trying to see what meals to make since we both work. What has helped us stay in our budget for groceries is 1. Planning our meals for the week, which helps us know what to buy and nothing else, and 2. Using cash only so when we get close to the end of the month we look at what we have at home and get creative :)
ReplyDeleteI pinned several recipes and chose from the ones that sounded the best and the least expensive. I would highly suggest doing crockpot meals because if you spend a couple hours on a Saturday to prep everything, its easy to throw it in the crockpot before work and it is ready when you get home. Then you can put it in a tupperware and have leftovers for lunches.
DeleteMeal planning helps so much! And I love the cash idea. We actually just started using Dave Ramsey's envelope method so we have been using cash fro groceries as well. It makes you think a lot more about how much you are spending and what you are spending on.