Monday 16 June 2014

Meal Plan

After the harsh reality of our roof bill that I spoke about in my last post, I took the weekend to brainstorm ideas on how we can be cutting back. The main idea I came up with was grocery shopping my own kitchen!

The first big job was taking inventory of all the food in our kitchen. I'm always amazing how much stuff we have and how many things get pushed to the back of cupboard and freezers. I'm one of those people that have to take every single thing out of the area I'm cleaning and reorganize, so my kitchen looked like a bomb exploded. I was happy to only have to throw out three items that were expired, even though I had prepared myself for more.

While organizing, I was making a meal plan for these upcoming weeks at the same time. I'm hoping for the rest of the month to get creative and strictly use what is in our cupboards. Only really grocery shopping for the basics: fruits, vegetables and milk. If we can do that it'll go a long way in not just helping us save money but make the most of the money we already used when we bought all this food. Otherwise it's just sitting there forgotten about getting closer and closer to it's expiration date, and there's nothing more I hate then throwing out food.

So far I've been working on eating some english muffins for breakfast I found in the freezer, I made pork souvlaki wraps, and yesterday we made pulled pork in the slow cooker with a mix I had found in the cupboard. Today I made homemade granola bars when I got home from work that were easy to make with really simple ingredients! I even was able to use some frozen cranberries that were in the very very back of the freezer. They turned out awesome and I will definitely be using this recipe again (link below).


Have any of you done a full inventory of your kitchen? Do you enjoy getting creative with meal plans?

- M

4 comments:

  1. We try to clean our pantry and freezer out once a year. I don't like wasting food and it seems like food gets wasted if I don't do that.

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    1. This is something I definitely want to get into the habit of doing, wasting food is basically throwing out money and I'm not in the position to be able to do that.

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  2. We just went through our shelves for the first time since we moved in a year ago. We got rid of a few items, but like you it wasn't as bad as I thought it could/would be. I'm now in the process of using up all those things... and we don't even eat that many things from a box. So I'm hoping to just buy fresh fruits/veggies for a few weeks and to live out of the freezer/cupboards.

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    1. It's crazy how much we've been able to accumulated in such a short amount of time. We have only been in our house for roughly a year and a half, and I honestly don't remember buying most of the items in my pantry/what the original purpose was :(

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