Operation Baby Preparation: Mealtime Adventures

If you've ever googled "Babies on a budget" or typed this into pinterest you will find 100s of articles and blog posts related to the topic, and some of them are great. I have particularly liked the ones that talked about what items are considered essential baby gear and which never get used. However, a lot of them are way too general to be at all helpful and it's really hard to figure out how their generic advice is supposed to fit into my life (like ones that say pay off all your debt before baby arrives....oh great idea, I was just hanging on to this student loan debt for the fun of it but now that a baby is coming I guess I'll finally part ways with it).

So this blog post is about one of the most talked about areas in our household: food.

For the past few weeks I have been engaging in meal planning like we have never done before. Usually we would have one or two ideas of something we wanted to make for the week, sometimes not even that. And then we would stop at the store mid-week, sometimes multiple times, to pick up dinner items, which is terribly inefficient and we ended up eating a lot of the same stuff over and over again. Chicken breasts with veggies. Taco salad. Chicken burgers. Week after week.

So I finally decided to crack down and start learning to cook. I do love to cook, I am just very bad at it. However, with baby on the way I really want to be able to make some delicious and nutritious meals. Family dinners are one of my favorite memories of childhood and when I go home the first thing I do is check the fridge to see what leftovers Mom has lying around, because nothing beats a homemade meal...even if it has been sitting in tupperware in the fridge. So I really want to be able to make a few meals here and there that can become family favorites.

Each week I plan ahead for the next week by entering meals into my google calendar that I intend to make. I have even become strategic in picking out these meals, first I think about what we already have. We get a lot of meat at Costco, so we usually have frozen chicken breasts and ground turkey on hand. Then I look at the sale papers to see what our local grocery stores have on sale, which usually helps me pick out another meal. Then I take to pinterest to figure out what kind of recipes exist for the things we already have and the things that are on sale. And you guys, we have been eating so many fun things!!

I suck at taking pictures of food so I promise they all taste better than they look - but here are some of the dishes I've cooked up in the past couple weeks.

Spaghetti Squash Carbonara (I found a tip that if you cook the squash in rings like this it helps you to get longer noodles!)

Pizza Zucchini Lasagna

Skinny Chicken Broccoli Alfredo

Oven Baked Chicken Fajitas turned into Tostadas

Homemade Mango Salsa with black beans

With this meal planning we are able to get all the groceries we need for the entire week in one weekend trip, which is great because then we are able to stick within our allotted grocery budget. To further help with this effort (and to be honest the one thing that actually keeps us within our grocery budget) is this awesome app called grocery pal. I have seen it listed on various websites as a great app for coupon collecting but I don't use it for that. It allows you to enter in each item as it goes into your cart along with the price and keeps a running total of your grocery bill. THIS IS AMAZING. Too often I have gone to the grocery store, looked at my cart and thought "Yeah, this is probably about $50" only to have the actual total land somewhere around $75. With this app we can see the price adding up as we choose items and make better decisions about what to purchase.

I'll note that using this app is easier if you go with a partner because typing in each item takes a minute and I tend to think the people around me just assume I am just clogging up the aisle with texting and hate me for standing still. So while I type, Devin drives the cart, and we tend to progress through the store pretty quickly.

I also keep a grocery list in the google calendar, where I add things as I decide on what meals I will be making. Then I can also look back from week to week to see what our usuals are so that I don't forget to pick up things like eggs, milk, bananas, cereal.

I have to say all of these have been fairly easy changes, but honestly changes we never felt like making before we had an actual reason. Now that we have a reason to save money and add some organization to our lives these changes have felt easy and very welcomed.