We will soon be switching to one income in the next month or so after my maternity leave ends and I will be leaving my position to become a Stay At Home Mom (SAHM). When I was younger, I used to imagine where I’d be at home as a SAHM, watching the kids and taking care of the house. I legitimately used to daydream that sometimes I’d be able to greet the kids coming home from school with fresh made chocolate chip cookies and milk. I know, I know, this sounds like it’s straight out of a 50’s ad, but it was what I wanted. I am super excited for this next chapter in my life, but it does require some change!
Halving our grocery budget — somehow our grocery budget slowly went up and up as I stopped buying only things that were on sale or that I had already carefully meal planned with. We started to splurge and waste items and eat out even though we had perfectly good food at home. Well, this will hopefully be ending now!
This next month, we are hoping to reduce our spending to 250$ total for food – this counts eating out along with groceries. This ends up equalling around ~4.50 per person per day. I am planning to do a combination of pantry and freezer meal planning along with purchasing additional groceries from the store.
We are lucky that our in-laws have a Costco membership, and they pick us up rice and flour in bulk as we need. We should not need either of those this month – but this will be an ongoing plan, so we will start to keep track of that cost as we need to ask for them to pick it up again.
This week I have started to only work half days. This lets me only need to take breakfast and a small snack with me to work and then I can cook myself/reheat something small once I get back home.
Our meal plan for this week is as follows:
- Banana Bread
- Individual yogurt packages (x2) – Once maternity leave starts, I will not be eating as much yogurt, or need the individual packaged versions for ease of packing to go to work, these were 1$ each
- Overnight Oats
- Baked Sweet Potato with maple syrup, brown sugar and pecans
- Fresh Mangoes (got these 4/1$!)
- Rice and Ethiopian Lentils
- Quesadillas with Black Beans and Rice
- Kimchi Fried Rice (recipe coming soon) with Soy Sauce Potatoes
- Mung Bean Sprouts Korean Side Dish and Mung Bean Sprouts Fried Rice – both soybean sprout recipes, but due to my soy allergy, I am using mung bean sprouts instead!
- Quick Pescetarian Pho – working on this recipe to make vegetarian!
With this meal plan, I was able to work through a few items in our fridge that were going bad (mint leaves), or about to go bad (mung bean sprouts), make use of bananas that were only good for baking (I made three loaves, and gave two away! This is a great low cost gift and people love homemade bread.), and also try to figure out how this next week will go. I am already very happy with how I have been able to work through the items in the fridge and pantry to create dishes that use up items we already have. I hope to get better at this as we continue this challenge.
Pantry items I will have to buy for next week already:
- Garlic
- Onions
- Brown Sugar
- New Fresh Fruit
The weekly ad for my local grocery store will be coming out tomorrow, so I’ll be basing my meal planning for next week off of that. At the same time, getting a little nervous as my due date is getting near – only two more weeks!
Laughter and Cooking 