The photo on the main page is Brussels sprouts, tomato and boiled potatoes with butter and green onion.
My paperwork projects outgrew my small desk for the time being, so all week I have been spreading out budget books and ledgers and paperwork onto the dinning table. Each time we eat we have to move the paperwork and then put it back, but it has been very productive.
We have been actively on the new budget and meal plan for nine days now.
We do our best to buy whole food and non processed items, but there are some things such as bacon or hot dogs and some condiments that we do buy that are processed. We do not buy cookies and chips and soda or things like that. We do buy the ingredients to make our own snacks and desserts, but we are not big at snacking. When we want a dessert we normally have that instead of our smaller meal of the day, not always but most often so we do not get too many calories since we are getting older.
Here on my blog post you see pies and cakes and such as that. I bake when we are going to have company or special occasions and often send much of that home with them so it does not sit around tempting us. Sometimes we will freeze some slices of cake to have when we get a wanting for dessert. When I do make a dessert for us we just try to keep it in moderation.
Meals are very different from house to house and country to country and there is nothing right or wrong here so I want to stress that it does not matter what food you put on your meal plan, what is important is that you have a meal plan so you can save money on groceries.
I will have to adjust as we go as far as trying to cook more like 1940 and shop like 1940. If it makes sense I will give it a try but if it doesn't we will keep doing what we are doing now and continue on with the study.
By having a menu plan I can see that it will make it easier when I want to make a special meal, something different than what is on the menu plan. I don't have to think about what to cook anymore so when I do want to make something special, the kitchen will be more organized and I will have better control knowing what I have and don't have on hand.
In the 1940's it was still common to shop at a butcher, a produce market, a grocer, a fish market. Dairy was only sold in grocery stores that had the right kind of refrigeration. There were still small towns that did not have the refrigeration they needed to keep dairy in their store so dairy was delivered to homes. It is interesting to read about the history of dairy farms to market. The late 1930s and 1940s this was a changing time for refrigeration. Milk and dairy continued on for many years past 1940, we still had a milkman in the 1970's.
I sat down and made a Monday through Sunday meal plan because I had these forms to write it in my planner.
This is the week we are on now... I keep my planner on my little desk and so I can see the menu each day. Everything is penciled in so I can change it at any time. It is messy but that is okay. Pie is what I decided to bake for our simple dessert because pie was a common dessert in 1940.
My meal plan is for two weeks and then I flip the pages back and start over again and again.
The menu plan is a guide. I wrote it with all the main meals as if they are at noon but they can be either noon or evening or anytime desired. I did not write the meal plan to say this is what you should eat, this is only to show what I did to help keep control of the grocery budget.
We all eat different meals, each household has different needs, food allergies, likes and dislikes and health issues. I am just sharing the order of a meal plan. If you are just starting a meal plan, write in what you like to eat but make sure to plan to use up your fresh food that will perish quickly so that your food does not go to waste. Consider your budget all the time you are planning out your meals.
When you buy perishables then make sure that you include them in other things so that they do not go to waste. If you buy a bag of carrots then use them in other meals that would include carrots.
You can add food in season such as our figs. We have been adding fresh figs to our breakfast in the morning because our fig tree is still making figs on our tree. If green beans are in the garden ready to harvest I will exchange the fresh beans with another vegetable on the menu plan.
When I was doing my weekly meal plan and budget I realized that when doing the (seven day weekly) meal plan during the month, that is only 28 days. There are three extra days that are not accounted for on the monthly budget. If someone gets paid only monthly then this could be a problem for the budget. That is three days of food for pets and people that might not have been planned for on the budget.
An example above. I just wrote in the menu to show in this blog those extra days that might not get in the budget when using a weekly meal plan. If we budget for a month of food, this is important.
Sorry about the glare on the calendar, it looks like the numbers are missing. So August flows into September and we start at the top counting weeks and when we get to the bottom we see two extra days for the monthly budget. Our "Weekly" meal plan is seven days per week but there is always 30 or 31 days other than February. So figure out where you want to plan and count that into the budget so you can make sure to stretch that monthly pay to get every day of that month.
Our budget is $100.00 per week. We actually do not have any idea how we will do or what to set at this time because we have been buying groceries as to what we thought we needed.
There are many things that happen in life that can throw us off balance. We had that to happen the last two years. We have been buying groceries and trying to make good meals but yet affordable without a meal plan. Still prices continued to inflate.
I imagine many of you have experienced this for different reasons. We are ready to get this straightened out!
It is time to get on a good budget and meal plan. We went $41.00 over the weekly budget this week, the overage is because we wanted to see if we did not have the ingredients for everything what it would cost but this is not possible because we keep a pantry/cupboard.
I can tell you that when you get a pantry or cupboards stocked then everything will flow better because there are many items that will last for several weeks or a month or so and will not need to be purchased each week and you will have a reserve. Often there is butter or milk, flour and sugar left over so it will take awhile to get the meal plan and budget to flow well. I hope that some of you already have a good flowing budget menu and can share in the forum.
We are repeating meals that we like very often on our meal plan. Here we have roasted chicken, sauted and roasted sweet potatoes, and zucchini. This is one of our simple go to meals.
Beef stew This is actually a small pot, it looks big in the photo. I made this for yesterdays meal.
When we purchased our stew beef we immediately divided the meat into serving portions for two because there is just two of us.
I saute the beef..
Add water... get it to simmering... add seasoning.... and let it simmer until the meat is getting tender...
Add whatever veggies you want to put in the stew, we normally put in carrots, potatoes and onion.
I cut the veggies into portions the size I like to cook them...
I used red potatoes.
Those are quartered onions pushed into the sides. I made too much stew so there was leftover. 
Charles worked out of town today so his meal plan today is hot dogs with onions and slaw. We try to buy nitrate free when we can find it. I also packed a small jar of fresh watermelon for a snack. This is an on the go meal for Charles to take to work and he enjoys this meal. His next Friday is a Hamburger patty with cooked mushrooms, onions and cheese on top, with a salad.
Since I made too much stew last night we have decided that I will actually make a bit more stew on Thursdays so we can have it for two days. This limits Charles having a hotdog and cabbage to one time per month. He will still get the treat but not as often. We freeze the hotdog so this will not be a problem and I will adjust the menu.
Pie is on the weekly menu planning. I will make a small pie that I will cut into portions so that three days per week we can eat a slice of that pie. The other four days we eat a light soup or salad and one of those four days is soup and grilled cheese sandwich.
My plan is to make one small loaf of bread each week, one small pie per week. On special occasions I will bake a cake. This is just for the plan, at any time we want a change and it works for the budget we write in another meal. I guess it is something like we say when we live in a small space that we have to fit into our space. Well, the food menu has to fit into the budget.
I am not suggesting you eat the food we eat. This is just what we eat. Each family eats different depending on where one lives or what one likes. This is just the order of how I did this. You may have something much better I am just very serious about we need a meal plan to be able to save money shopping for our groceries.
For the weekend I have made meals very simple.
Each Sunday we make a English Cottage Pie because we love this Pie. It is Ground or minced Beef, English peas, mashed potatoes, onions and carrots. It has Beef stock, Worcestershire sauce, tomato paste a small bit of flour just to thicken so if you cannot have gluten use a small bit of corn starch or leave it out completely. This has no crust as normally a chicken pot pie has, it is simply topped with mashed potatoes.
Our meals do not have a lot of carbs or sugar. The pies I choose to make I always reduce the sugar. Potatoes are only in three meals per week and they are baked or boiled.
My calendar is very light because it is penciled in so if you can even read the calendar you may have noticed that pancakes are every other day and eggs and bacon are the other day. I make whole wheat soaked flour pancakes. I make these as healthy as possible and we love these pancakes, they taste wonderful and we do not load them up with a lot of syrup and stuff. We do butter them, I eat mine with butter only because this is how I like them and Charles likes a small amount of jam or syrup. I make a batch of them on Saturday big enough to last through the week and put them in the freezer and then we eat them throughout the next week.
Our salads are most often lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, sometime olives and we normally make oil and vinegar dressing.
This is what the one patty burger meal looks like. Saute the mushrooms with onions, add cheese a dab of homemade mayonnaise and a salad. This is what I pack for Charles for one of his Friday meals for the road. We also like to make this for a quick meal if we are busy. So have some reserved meal ideas too.
Zinnias from where I threw out some extra seed earlier in the year.
I will close here before I make it more confusing. I hope something in this post made sense or has been helpful. Grandma Donna
