Mission Impossible-wait no, totally possible

I talked about it before, my grocery budget/meal planning/feeding my family well Mission. I want to show you what makes it work for me.

The first thing I do is make a meal plan for the week. There are a few things that steer my choices.
Is this Hubs' work week? Because I'm basically a single parent all week and holy moly, you know that means meals have to be make-ahead or super, super easy.  And seriously, props to all the parents who go it alone, because how the hell do they do it? I think it's a blessing for everyone involved that I am a part of a parenting TEAM and not left to my own devices.
If Hubs is off work, then the sky is the limit. Remember, my man is a killer in the kitchen.

What's in season? I'm not making anything that requires fresh tomatoes in the winter. Why? Because they taste like Styrofoam and it's a waste of money.  My local Meijer does a pretty good job in the produce department, but there are just some things I can't do.

What do I already have on hand? I love to stock my pantry and freezer. This year we filled our freezer with 1/4 of a grass fed cow and 1/2 of a pig that was raised without hormones or anti-biotics. We've also made several trips to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's for staples. Both stores are about an hour from us, so when we go, we stock up.

We try so, so hard to eat whole foods and make as much as we can from scratch. We fall short of that goal often enough, but we both also work full time and are trying to keep up with two little kids. Ok, whatever-we do the best we can.

One of my most useful Christmas gifts from this year:

 This chalkboard hangs in my kitchen and announces to anyone who walks in what's on the menu for the week. My mom likes to look at it and then "drop by" on nights we're eating her favs.

After the menu is planned, the grocery list is compiled. I keep recipes on hand and lots of cookbooks. I love cookbooks and my bookshelf can prove it. Hubs considered having my head examined because of all the cookbooks I buy, but I got a handle on the problem by way of the internet and all of her glorious, free recipes! We have to folders in the kitchen- one is our go-to favs and the other is a stack of recipes I want to try. The latter gets cleaned out every once in a while because sometime our tastes change before I get to a recipe that sounded perfect when I saw it.

OK, so I pull out the recipes and cookbooks for that week's menu and make my grocery list from them.

I swear this method is the only way were are ever able to stay on our grocery budget AND don't end up ordering  take-out at 6:45 because we don't know what's for dinner and it's too late to start it anyway.

Call me an ass if you want to, but almost everything that comes out of our kitchen is better than any restaurant. So, the only benefit to eating out is having someone else do all the work and  the clean up (ummmm, maybe it is worth it?)

I like to use my chalkboard as an opportunity to talk to people about how awesome we are. We have inspired others to make a meal plan and obviously their lives are better for knowing us. Duh, because we are awesome.

Even at my level of awesome, I love to read and talk about how other people to make it work-you know recipes, ideas-anything that is awesome.

Speaking of awesome: