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).

Canadian Budget-binder Homemade Granola Bar link

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

- M