Ideas for Weekly Meal Planning

When practicing a household budget, planning a weekly menu is an important detail. To successfully plan a menu, choose meals that have ingredients that can be used in meals throughout the week, which will keep your food costs to a minimum.

Buy in Bulk

When you buy items in bulk, such as family packs of meat, you can divide them into smaller packages to use throughout the week. For example, if you buy a family package of ground beef, you could use it to make lasagna one night, meatloaf the second night and hamburgers the third night.

Meat

On nights that you plan on preparing steak, chicken or pork, prepare more than needed for the meal to enable you to use the leftover meat for fajitas or soup the next day. To make fajitas, simply saute onions and bell peppers. Place a small amount of meat and vegetables on tortillas. To make vegetable soup, add a can of mixed vegetables and a can of broth to meat and let simmer for at least 20 minutes.

Potatoes

A bag of potatoes can make several, very different meals. Shred potatoes to make hash browns for breakfast, cut them into strips to make french fries for lunch, peel and cut them into quarters and boil them to make mashed potatoes for dinner.

Pasta

One bag of pasta, such as macaroni, can be divided in half. Combine one half of the pasta with cheese to make homemade macaroni and cheese. The other half of the pasta can be made into macaroni salad by using 1/2 cup of mayonnaise, 1 stalk of diced celery, 1 diced carrot, 1 small diced onion and 2 tbsp. of relish.

On-Hand Supplies

Make a habit of keeping certain foods on hand in the pantry. Supplies such as a variety of canned vegetables, pasta, flour, sugar, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, bread, milk and eggs come in handy often. These supplies are basic ingredients for many meals and recipes.

[schuschan]

on 9/7/2009 Great ideas!