Menus and freezers and budgets, oh my! (Part 2)

Okay, so in part 1 I said that next time I would talk about how I shop. But I also said I'm not good at sticking to a plan. So today instead, I'm going to talk about how I cook to freeze. There are three main strategies I use, and they work well for different things.

1. Freezer Day

The idea here is to block out a day (usually a weekend) and to just make a whole lot of food to put in your freezer. Some people call this Once a Month Cooking, and actually make 30 different meals in one day, but I have never managed to do anything like that. Usually I just choose one thing to make a lot of, or a few things that have common ingredients.

For example, this past weekend, my husband and I made 15 pans of lasagna. This honestly isn't much harder than making one or two pans of lasagna. Mixing a ton of filling isn't any harder than mixing a little. We just made the sauce, cooked some ground beef, then assembly lined the lasagna in disposable foil loaf pans. We had extra sauce so I froze that in Tupperware containers for easy spaghetti nights.

I find that this method works really well for me for most casseroles, where cooking the ingredients is really the most time consuming part, and having them pre-assembled means a super easy dinner. I don't pre-bake them; I just bake them on the day I plan to eat.

The problem with this method is that it takes a huge time commitment. Especially with a toddler running around, it's hard to block out that much time. My husband and I ended up doing the bulk of the prep after bedtime, and were up until 11:30 cleaning up. Boo.

2. Just make extra

This is actually the method I prefer. Instead of trying to make a month or a year's worth of something, I just make a little extra. Since it's just the two (and a half) of us, and most of my recipes are for four, I usually have extra anyway. Sometimes I go one step further and double it. Then after dinner, I pack up the extra and freeze it.

This is so easy because it doesn't take any extra time at all in my dinner prep, and gives me fully cooked, microwavable dinners for nights when I don't have time to cook. I like to do this with chili, sausage and peppers, shredded meat for tacos or sandwiches, stews, or anything that might require a long cooking time the first night.

3. Prep and freeze

Some things are just better if you make them the night of, but you can make your life easier and save money by doing the prep work ahead of time. For example, I keep a bag of diced carrots, onions, and celery in my freezer. I can dice it during naptime and then just grab a handful when I need it. I also buy bell peppers when they are on sale (because holy crap they get expensive), cut them into strips, and freeze them in freezer bags. You can even cook your meat ahead of time for recipes that use cooked meat. Browning an entire 3 pound package of ground beef doesn't take any longer than browning a single pound, and then you have some options for fast cooking dinners. Baking a whole bunch of chicken breasts ahead makes life easier too - just defrost as many as you need to make quick enchiladas, salads, or sandwiches.

Some people will even prepare and measure the ingredients for a specific recipe into a freezer bag. For instance, you could freeze sliced peppers and onions along with a chicken breast in a bag for quick, no prep, fajitas. Just dump the whole bag into a pan and sautee it up. I don't have much experience with this, but it's something I'd like to try more of.

Do Good: Give 30 (or more) meals

Just in time for my Do Good Challenge, I found out about this awesome initiative from Kidfresh.

Kidfresh is a company that makes ready to eat food for kids that it is both healthy and delicious. Since I am always interested in getting more real and whole foods into our lives, and especially into my daughter, this is something I would love to try. It's also a family run company, which makes me want to support them even more.

But what I'm here to talk about today is their initiative with City Harvest. City Harvest is a food relief organization in New York that feeds over 300,000 people a week. And until December 15, for every new like on their facebook page, Kidfresh will donate 30 meals to them. How amazing! And what an easy thing to do!

Because I wrote this post, Kidfresh will donate an additional 300 meals to City Harvest. If you have a blog and would like to do the same, let me know, and I will send you the details. Happy do-gooding!

Do Good this holiday season: A linkup and challenge

It's the holiday season, and I know that for me giving and helping others is a huge part of what makes it special. So, I thought I'd go ahead and start a Do Good challenge here on my blog. I'm going to try to come up with at least one thing I can do every day to help others, particularly things that I can do without spending a lot of time or money, and share them with you. I may not post about them every day, but I'll try to get at least 5 of them up every week.

I invite you to participate in my Do good challenge also! Link up below any Do good posts you write for your blog this week. Link up as many times as you like!

So here goes, my "do good" task for today is to read a book on We Give Books

We give books is a great website where you can read digital copies of children's books for free. For every book you read, Penguin Publishers donates one new book to the children's charity you choose. I cannot think of a simpler way to enjoy giving, and teach your children to give, this holiday season.

Now get linking!

Menus and freezers and budgets, oh my! (Part 1)

Anyone will tell you that meal planning is the key to saving money at the grocery store. As far as I can tell there are two main strategies for menu planning, as it relates to saving money.

The first strategy is to plan an entire week's worth of meals before you go to the grocery store. Make a list of all the ingredients you will need for your dinners, as well as anything you may need to make breakfasts and lunches. Buy only those things.

The idea here is that you save money by avoiding impulse buys, by avoiding extra trips to the store mid-week when you realize you forgot something (extra trips which inevitably lead to impulse buys), and by avoiding food waste when you buy something because it looks good but have absolutely no idea or intention of using it.

You can save even more money if you make your meal plan with your grocery ad next to you, planning the main ingredients around what happens to already be on sale. You end up with a little repetition of meat this way, unless you have a lot of great sales, but you can save big.

This is a great way to grocery shop. It is efficient, frugal, and can be very successful. But it's not what I do.

The buy ahead principle

Instead, my goal is to have everything I need for an entire week's worth of meals before I go to the grocery store. On Friday, before I go shopping, I survey my freezer and pantry and make a meal plan based on what I already have. Some of the meals are things that I've cooked ahead and stashed in my freezer. Some of the meals are quick cooking staples in our house, or easy crockpot recipes, that I just keep the main ingredients of onhand. But the idea is before I go to the store, I should be able to count at least 7 easily available dinners in my house. I double check all the extra ingredients and sides for each meal, and add any that I'm missing to my list, but it is a very small part of my weekly grocery list.

Why?

There are a few main reasons for this. The first is that I'm generally just not good at sticking to a plan. When I count my 7 meals of the week, I know I won't get to all of them. I'll probably have a leftover night. I may have a sandwich night. We may go out. DH or I may decide we don't want to eat anything I planned and just make a frozen pizza. If I bought only the week's worth of meals, I would lose that flexibility.

The biggest reason, though, is saving money. I try to buy things only when they are on sale. Other than fresh fruit and milk, which we buy almost every week, almost nothing enters my house that wasn't at least 50% off. This saves me big at the grocery store.

How?

The basic principle here is that you need to start small. Every week, you can add just one extra meal to your freezer stash. This way you won't go crazy overbudget or make yourself crazy with all the cooking.

Then as you start to develop a freezer stash, you'll be able to spend more of your budget on stockpile items and less on weekly need items. If I know I have 5 containers of chili, 5 containers of slow cooked taco beef, and 3 lasagnas in my freezer? Then each week's meals become very easy to plan.

The plan is to write part 2 about how I shop, and part 3 about how I assemble freezer meals, and possible a part 4 with recipes. But I'm not good at plans. Leave a comment letting me know how you meal plan, or what you would like to know about my meal planning and shopping, and we'll play it by ear, okay?

How I get deals at CVS

Sign-up

In order to get the best deals at CVS, you need to sign up for an ExtraCare card. Once you have one, you should register and sign up to get CVS emails. When you do, you will also get coupons to use and even get surveys you can take to earn more extracare bucks.

You can also sign up for the CVS beauty club to get extra offers.

Read

Read a good deal blog that lists the weekly CVS deals along with coupon matchups. My favorites for CVS are Simply CVS and Coupon Katarina. They list all the deals and any coupons available to go with them.

Some of the deals will be cheap with just the coupon, but many of them are only cheap after extra care bucks. These are in-store dollars that you receive for purchasing certain items and can use on future purchases.

Roll

Once you've bought a few things and earned some extra care bucks, roll them onto future purchases. This is where the savings really comes in.

Tips

• Always scan your card at the price scanner when you go into the store. It will print personalized coupons for you, sometimes for free items.
  
• Extra care bucks expire, and some weeks have better deals than others, so if you can get something "free", it's often best to buy it to roll your ECB's, even if you don't really want or need it, just to extend the expiration dates of your bucks.
  
• If you have a manufacturers coupon for an item that is already free after ECB's, you still get the full ECB value listed in the add, so you can actually grow your ECB's, essentially making money for taking home the shampoo or toothpaste.
  
• When you have more than a certain number of ECB's (for me, around 5; some people carry over a lot more), it's best to spend some down by buying milk or some non-ECB deals that you happen to need. This keeps you from having a ton that you have to spend before they expire.
  
• You can only use one manufacturers coupon and one store coupon per item, so if you have 2 $2 ECB's and want to buy a $4 item, you'll need to buy a cheap filler item.
  
• If you can go more than once a week, or split your order into multiple transaction, you can minimize your out of pocket spending by only paying for the first item and using ECB's to pay for the rest.
  
• You also get quarterly ECB's in the amount of 2% of your out of pocket spending. I now get almost nothing since most of my spending is coupons and ECB's.
  
• Also get a green bag tag. It costs $1, but if you attach it to a reusable bag and scan it with your extra care card, you will earn $1 ECB for every four scans.
  
  

Make sense?