Week #8: Meal Planning & Grocery Shopping

This week's challenge in The 52 Week Organized Home Challenge is Healthy Meal Planning and Creating Grocery Shopping List.

This week's challenge wasn't too difficult because I already have a pretty good system for meal planning & grocery shopping.

I usually go grocery shopping on Mondays or Thursdays.  It just depends what day I have a sitter as I do not like having to take the girls.  The girls aren't very cooperative, mama ends up getting mad & it is an unpleasant experience for everyone!  So it's just easier to wait until Jenny comes to watch the girls. which is usually on Mondays or Thursdays.

Before I make my shopping list, I usually go through the current week's ads & look for any good sales going on. 

 If I find anything I need, I circle it to remind myself to look for it when I'm out shopping.

Each week I shop at two stores--Super Walmart & Trader Joe's.  I buy our dairy, meat & produce at Trader Joe's and everything else at Super Walmart.  The nice thing about Super Walmart is that they will price match any competitor's ads/coupons.  So although I found these Lean Cuisines on sale at Albertsons, I just take the ad to Super Walmart & they will price match it for me.  I like it because it prevents me from having to go to 5+ stores each week.

I then go through my coupon binder & look for any coupons I may have for items that I need and/or on sale.

After looking through the ads & collecting coupons, I create my menu for the week as well as my shopping list.  I try to create meals based on what is on sale, but that doesn't always work.  And lately we've been trying to incorporate a couple of vegetarians based meals to our menu so I try to incorporate that into meal planning & shopping as well.  And 99% of our meals are from the Cooking Light magazine or another healthy website/cookbook, so we already have healthy meal planning in check (like this week's challenge wants us to focus on).

Then it's off to the store to do my shopping.  Once I get home & put away my groceries, I look at the week ahead and determine what day we will have certain meals on.  I mostly take into consideration when Marc is traveling & decide our meals that way.  I don't usually make big meals when Marc is traveling so the girls and I usually do simple meals (think homemade pizza or breakfast for dinner).

After everything is finalized, I post our menu up on the fridge for everyone to see.

And then I do it all again the following week!

Next Week's Challenge: Addresses/Contact Information