Meal Planning: 5/26 thru 6/1

Brand new to Meal Planning?

Start by reading all about Meal Planning (scroll down to "A Day in My Life" on the right-hand side of this page and click Meal Planning: How To Get Started or just click here) in order to familiarize yourself with the steps! There, you will find a link to a detailed example of my own weekly meal planning where I walk you through step-by-step.
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The first thing I do on Saturday mornings is to look back over the week to see if we did indeed eat everything on my meal plan and adjust my inventory, reducing it by what we ate and increasing it by anything I purchased and/or made-ahead. We ate everything on our meal plan last week so, I adjusted my inventory accordingly. I also increased my inventory by the shrimp, ground turkey, chicken thighs, and chicken breasts I purchased. I eliminated the red pepper puree and mushroom stroganoff sauce from my inventory as we ate them for lunch over the 3-day Memorial Day weekend.

Inventory
4 portions ground turkey
1 portions pork chops
6 portions boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 portion chicken thighs
3 portions shrimp
1 portions made-ahead turkey meatballs
2 portions made-ahead meatloaf
2 portions made-ahead chicken enchiladas verdes
1 portions made-ahead pesto

Then, I shopped my pantry, freezer and fridge for ingredients to come up with some meals, looking at our family calendar to ensure I wasn't planning on something we had recently eaten. I scanned the weekly ad to see what was on sale that might complement and/or substitute for what I had come up with and of course, how to stretch ingredients over enough meals to use them up.

Weekly Meal Plan
Grilled chicken with roasted corn on the cob and spinach salad
Chicken & spinach flautas with chips & salsa
Turkey Mac with spinach salad 
Leftovers
Family Game Night/Dinner Out
Turkey tacos
Crockpot shredded BBQ sandwiches with tator tots
 

So, how did I come up with this meal plan? 

With our summer vacation and move just around the corner, it's important to me that we clean out the fridge, pantry, and freezer as best we can to limit what we will have to throw away and/or give away so, first I checked the calendar and found that there are only 19 days until we leave. Then, I looked over my freezer inventory to see how I could eat up everything we have on-hand in those 19 days. An easy entertaining meal of grilled chicken, roasted corn on the cob, and a spinach salad was planned for Saturday night as we were with friends. To use up the bulk of the baby spinach I purchased this week for only $2.50, as well as the tortillas I had on hand, I planned to try out a new recipe for chicken & spinach flautas I found on Pinterest. The recipe called for chicken thighs and I had a coupon for $3.00 off any O brand Organic chicken, making the thighs I needed for the recipe only $2.00! The remaining baby spinach will be used in another side salad to go along with Turkey mac. I have ground turkey breast, whole wheat elbow macaroni, and all other ingredients on hand. Plus, I can double the recipe to use up all the ingredients I have on hand and have lunch/dinner for Emily and I through the week. Because turkey mac only requires half a package of ground turkey breast, I added turkey tacos to the meal plan to use the other half. Turkey tacos will help use up the tortillas I have on hand. In order to help use up the slider-sized buns I have on hand as well as the ketch-up, brown sugar, vinegar, and other ingredients, I added Crockpot shredded BBQ chicken sandwiches to my meal plan. I have frozen tator tots on hand, which I'll serve with it to help use them up. Leftovers and a dinner out meal were also added for the week.

What did I purchase this week?

 

Although we are trying to clean out the freezer and fridge, I spent $106.58 and stocked up on all the "Buy 1 Get 1 Free" offers Safeway was offering as pantry items are easy to move and have a long shelf life. Some of the best "BoGo" deals include: Velveeta, Baby Ray's BBQ sauce, Lawry's marinades, La Victoria salsa, Easy-off oven cleaner, Tostitos tortilla chips, pickles, and Guerrero tortillas. I also purchased corn at 10@$2.00, a jug of salsa for $5.00, avocados at 3@$1.00, baby spinach $2.50, and snap peas for $1.99. I also purchased our normal, weekly Organic strawberries, blueberries, and tomatoes as well as bananas and grapes for the week's meals and snacks and deli ham. The beer was a special splurge for some Memorial Day grilling we are doing with friends.