Shopping and Meal Planning in Our Family

Our wonderful little family consists of me, my husband Ty, my brother Matt who is our roommate and my brother Jacob who lives next door. We're all very close and since we live in the same apartment building it just makes sense that we eat most meals together. Ty and I do the meal planning and then Matt, Ty and I do the shopping.

We when were first living together Ty and I had a very relaxed approach to meals and shopping. We shopped for food one or two meals at a time and made multiple trips to the grocery store each week. Before long we began to see the flaws and this type of system and knew we had to come up with something better.

The first thing we did was implement meal planning. We now plan meals for five nights of the week, leaving the other two nights open to use up left-overs or account for the occasional meal out.

Each week before we go to the grocery store, Ty and I look through our various cookbooks, family recipes, food magazines and AllRecipes.com recipes to plan our five meals for the week. We make sure to include at least two vegetarian or vegan recipes each week to broaden our culinary horizons.

The second thing we did to save time and money was to pledge to only go grocery shopping once a week...and only once. In the summer of 2008, when gas prices made it past $4 here in Montana we decided that we didn't want to use to gas to drive across town to the grocery store more than once a week. If we were going to be using gas we wanted our destination to be more exciting than WalMart! So we made it a rule and we've stick to it. The implications of this rule have saved us more money than you might think. Because we're not making multiple trips to the grocery store we've cut down on all those little impulse purchases you're tempted to make when running to the store to "just pick up one thing" (a soda, some chips a spin around the cheese island and before you know it your cart is filled! ).

Meal planning and once-a-week grocery shopping has done wonders for my family by saving us immeasurable time, money and frustration.