Menu Plan Monday

Good Monday morning! 
We are at the end of the month/groceries from our last monthly shop, so this is the time of the month to get creative. 
Here is a list of meals I came up with for this week. 
If you’re interested, come back on Friday to read about the side dishes I served with each meal. 
Until then, I hope you have a wonderful week. 

Baked Ricotta Bowls

Soup Beans & Cornbread

Salmon Patties

Fluffy Baked Omelet

White Chicken Enchiladas

Chef AJ’s Lentil Tacos

BelindaMortgage & Debt Free~ Living within our Means ~My Linktree
~ She looketh well to the ways of her household ~Proverbs 31:27

What We Ate This Week

Sunday & Monday
Chili Tacos
Normally I Serve this with lettuce and tomato on top, but I was out so we did without. 

Tuesday
Baked Pizza Beans with Cheese Chicken Broccoli Rice Coleslaw Hominy

Wednesday
Pizza My daughter was at Walmart today and found two pizzas on markdown for $3.33 each, so she picked these up and made one for dinner before I arrived home from work.


Thursday
No Photo, Sorry. Spaghetti Garlic Bread Broccoli

Friday Sausage Quiche (I found some eggs in the freezer) Carrots

Looks like a funky quiche, but I was tired from work and didn't care about the looks. Tasted good, so we were happy. LOL
What was for dinner in your home this week?
Belinda ~ Living within our Means ~

Sunday

Sunday Dinner will be a Vegetable Stir Fry. I started out by cutting up half of a cabbage from the crisper, and added broccoli, yellow peppers, and a teriyaki stir fry sauce (3 for $1.00 at UGO) from the freezer, and a wild rice pilaf mix, soy sauce, water chestnuts, and pineapple from the pantry. The rice was free after a coupon deal. The peppers were free, and the pineapple was 20¢ after coupon. So, this dinner cost under $4.00 to feed my family of three. 

I also made another pasta salad while I was in the kitchen. I used my last two packages of on sale pasta (rotini) to make enough pasta salad, hopefully, to last for several lunches the next few days. I added tomatoes, cucumbers, red peppers, and radishes from the crisper. Black olives, the last of a bottle of Suddenly Salad topping, and some Ranch and Italian dressing from the pantry, and also added some peas & broccoli from the freezer. Again, It gave me a good feeling to use up some more items from the pantry. 

Breakfast and lunch are free to all students again this year, so that will be very helpful, although my daughter prefers breakfast at home. I do have some breakfast burritos for her in the freezer ready to go. All she or I have to do is heat them in the morning. 

I took an inventory of my freezers and pantry yesterday and did find a couple of things I had forgotten that I had, so I am incorporating them into my meal plans for the week. This is the reason it is important to stay on top of your freezer and pantry inventory, so items don't get lost in the shuffle and expire before you are able to use them and get your money's worth out of them. 

I've got some beans on soaking for another meal one day this week. I will be making baked beans with these and adding hot dogs as well. 

Other items on the dinner menu, not in any particular order, this week will include...

- Bean & Cheese Enchiladas
- Chili Mac (using my last box of Elbow Mac & last package of Beef)
- Smoked Sausage, Potatoes & Green Beans
- Baked Potatoes with Sour Cream, Broccoli 
- Hot Dogs & Baked Beans, Mashed Potatoes, Corn

For now I have all the laundry cleaned, folded, and put away, for at least five minutes. lol 

I've got our alarms turned back on for our first day back to school in the morning. I have my clothes laid out already. My daughter has been getting her school supplies in order along with getting her outfits picked out and her water bottle and snack. She gets low blood sugar at school and needs to have a snack with her. I am not subbing so far this week, but already have the first three days of next week booked. 

How was your weekend?

Belinda
Live simply by not spending money you don't have.
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011 - 2015.

Saving Money on Meat or Not

Our local Cooke's grocery store has ground chuck on sale this week for $3.99 a pound. They also have the Ball Park Hamburgers on sale for $6.49. And many people I know enjoy the convenience of having the Ball Park Hamburgers on hand for a quick meal, but is the convenience of having already cooked ready made hamburgers worth an additional $2.50? With the high price of groceries these days, $2.50 can buy more food. This seems like a no brainer to me. 

I can think of at least four meals my family misses having since we have reduced our consumption of meat. They are tacos made with ground beef, meatloaf, Pedernales potatoes, and hamburgers. While I miss the days of ground chuck being on sale for $1.39, I am thinking about breaking down and buying some of this for $3.99  a pound and making a couple of my family's favorite dishes. 

There are ways I can stretch the meat to make it seem like there is more there than meets the eye. I can add potatoes, which I have always done, to the taco meat and I can add crackers to the meat for meatloaf. 

Taco Meat with Potatoes added to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the meat

What do you think?

Update: I went to Cooke's on Saturday and looked at the meat. The packages were slightly over two pounds each and were close to $10.00 in price. Cooke's is usually well known for the quality of their fresh meat, but when I compared the ground chuck to the ground beef, I didn't see much difference. In fact, the ground beef, which was 10¢ cheaper, actually looked better. In the end, I decided against buying any meat. It just didn't look good enough to spend $10.00 for in my opinion. 

Belinda
CFO ~ Chief Frugal Officer
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011-2014.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”
"Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle ~ It will help you save money"

Second Frugal Week of February

What a week we had here! School was called off for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday due to the winter mix of weather here. We were/are on Winter Break Friday, Monday and Tuesday, so no school here for over a week. I missed out on several days of working as a result. 

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were no spending any money days.

Thursday was bill paying day and all bills were paid online to save on postage. 

Friday was spent in town doing our big monthly stock up at the grocery stores. I spent a total of $202.77, used 82 coupons, which saved me $116.40 and does not even include the $50.00 savings at Food Lion for the sale on Powerades.  

Here is a breakdown of items we bought:

Family Dollar

Suave Shampoo - Same deal as last week. I had a $1.00 of coupon, so I only had to pay the 10¢ sales tax. 

Cooke's

Cheese, frozen dinners, cat treats, and 40 pounds of potatoes ($7.98 or 20¢ a pound). I found 14 bags of cat treats in the Crash & Burn cart for 90¢ each, and I had coupons for them, so I paid 40¢ each for them. 

Save a Lot

Eggs are/were on sale this week for 99¢ a dozen, so we stocked up and bought 8 cartons. We also used a $1.00 off coupon to score a free bag of salad. 

Aldi

5 bags of onions

Food Lion

I went on Friday to score the deal on Powerades. And then on Saturday I found some coupons to use, so after my daughter's volunteer hours were done, we went back to get more. In the end I bought 75 Powerades for my pantry for 20¢ each. This definitely beats her wanting to stop at the gas station on the way to school in the morning for a drink for $1.89. There are only 68 school days left this year, so she is all set. 

I also scored 16 FREE cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. As I mentioned in this post the kiosk was printing out coupons for $1.00 off 2 Campbell's soup and they had them on sale for 50¢ each. Customers are only allowed to print one coupon sheet per day, but people tend to abandon these coupon sheets in their cart, so we picked up several that way. We also bought cereal, soup, diced tomatoes, and honey mustard here. 

Bi-Lo

Bi-Lo had their awesome cereal deal again this week. You buy 6 boxes of cereal and get a free gallon of orange juice. We had numerous coupons for the cereal and at least one of them was buy one get one free. We bought two of these deals and combined with the cereal deal at Food Lion, we ended up with 22 boxes of cereal. My family has gone through a lot of cereal this winter for some reason, so I was very glad to be able to purchase all of these.  

I also bought sugar, bagels, shampoo, and yogurt here. 

Publix

Some of my greatest deals came from Publix on this shopping trip. I used to shop at Walmart so much, but in the last two years I've realized that I can find better prices at the grocery stores and when I combine them with sales and the double coupons that Publix offers, I buy very little from Walmart now. 

Items here included cream cheese, oranges, fish, tea bags, Knorr rice packages, Kotex, Stayfree, ham, olives, beans, sour cream, salt, rice, butter, yogurt, tartar sauce, Alleve, peas and carrots, and chocolate milk (had coupons!).

I bought 18 bags of the Knorr rice for 14¢ each after sale and coupons.

Four boxes of Lipton tea bags were $1.12 each after sale and coupons. 

Four boxes of 40 count Alleve were 49¢ each after sale and coupons. 

Walmart sells my brand of Stayfree for $4.97, which I buy regularly. Publix sells the same package for $4.09, but with coupons I was able to get two bags for $4.09, which blows Walmart's price out of the water! 

It was a terrific shopping day and these are the things we got that were completely free: 

In the end I bought $369.17 worth of groceries for $202.77 and now the bulk of my grocery shopping is done for the month. All I will need to buy is milk and bread and some fresh produce. 

Other things we did this week to save money include:

Tuesday I entered My Coke Rewards points into my computer. A chore I dislike a great deal, but I do it for the free diet coke 12 packs for my Mother who is on a limited budget.

On Saturday we both had our hair cut and used a coupon for that as well. 

We rented a movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, with a free rental code from Redbox. CouponDad.net regularly has free rental codes on his blog. 

Breakfasts this week consisted of oatmeal, leftovers, scrambled eggs and toast, toast with butter and jelly, cream cheese with bagels, and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches.

Dinners were:

Monday: Baked Potatoes stuffed with Vegetable Chili
Tuesday: Hot Dogs & Tator Tots
Wednesday: Salisbury Steak, Beefy Mushroom Barley, Corn
Thursday: Macaroni & Cheese, Broccoli
Friday: Homemade Pizza
Saturday: Grilled Chicken, Mexican Rice, Steamed Carrots
Sunday: Pinto Beans, Collard Greens, Cornbread

That's our our week went, how was your week?

How did you save money in your home this week?

Belinda
CFO ~ Chief Frugal Officer
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011-2014.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”

My Frugal Week

I went to IGA on Monday morning to take advantage of a meat sale. I bought 10 pounds of ground beef, which was on sale for $1.99 a pound. This was not the ground chuck that I used to purchase. This was ground beef at 73/27 mixture. I made sure I drained this meat well after cooking. 

I don't know if we will ever be able to purchase ground chuck at a decent price again unless I find it on markdown, which does happen from time to time. 

I also bought a package of 3 sirloin pork roasts, which were also on sale for $1.99 a pound. There were three nice sized roasts in the package and I cut each one of them in half, which is plenty for the three of us for one meal. I put 4 of them in the freezer, saved one to cook for dinner, and gave one to my Dad. 

On Tuesday we woke up to snow in the forecast, but school was still open, which turned out to be a mistake. I dropped my daughter off at school only to turn around 2 hours later and pick her up and had a rough drive there and back. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday turned out to be snow days and unfortunately, I missed two days of working as a result. 


All breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were eaten at or came from home this week. 

Dinners this week included:

Monday: Tacos with all the fixings
Tuesday: Spaghetti & Garlic Bread
Wednesday: Meatloaf, Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans & Onions
Thursday: Chili
Friday: Chili Tacos
Saturday: LaChoy Beef Chow Mein, Rice, Corn
Sunday: Pork Roast, Oven Roasted Potatoes & Carrots

Other things done to save money include:

1. Read a book for free on my tablet Kindle.
2. Paid bills online to save on postage costs.
3. Entered codes at Kellogg's Family Rewards
4. Entered codes at My Perks for Purina Cat Chow
5. Entered codes at My Coke Rewards
6. Watched Port Charles for free on You Tube during free Internet time. 
7. Stayed home four days this week and spent no money. 

Things we do every week to save money:

1. Haul our own garbage for free to the county dumpsters. 
2. Paid bills online to save on postage. 
3. Used cloth napkins at meal time instead of paper napkins. 
4. Combined all my errands into one trip this week to save on gas. 
5. Log onto MyPerksCatChow.com daily to earn free cat food. 
6. Clip coupons from the Sunday Paper.
7. Check grocery store sale ads for good deals on food. 
8. Combine store coupons & manufacture coupons with sales to get the best price on food. 
9. Use paper in the printer twice by reusing to print on 2nd side. 
10. Make use of residual heat on my electric stove. 

January always brings with it extra expenses for the renewal of my car registration, auto insurance, and auto membership, which is a yearly fee. All expenses have been paid for and I even have a little surplus left at the end of the month, which is a good thing. 

How did your week shape up this time?

Belinda
CFO ~ Chief Frugal Officer
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011-2014.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”

Snow Day ~ Good Day for Chili

Today marks the 3rd day in a row we've had no school due to inclement weather. With snow on the ground it made the perfect day for chili, and I had several containers of leftovers that I could sneak into the chili pot.  

Onions & tomatoes from the tacos this week, canned tomatoes left from some I put in the meatloaf this week, two small containers of spaghetti sauce, and the leftover beans from one day this week. 

This is a good example of the "use it up" philosophy we subscribe to at the Frugal Workshop. No food waste here this week and no one was the wiser that these things were added. 

Here is what the chili looked like afterwards: 

Here is my daughter's bowl:

Afterwards, we settled down to play a game of Crazy Eights. 

School has been cancelled again for tomorrow, and law enforcement officials are telling people to stay off the roads as they are dangerous.  Looks like I will have gas leftover at the end of this week too, just like last week. I think by the time this is over I am going to have cabin fever, lol. 

Hope you all are staying warm where ever you are. 

Belinda
CFO ~ Chief Frugal Officer
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011-2014.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”

My Frugal Week

Monday was Martin Luther King day, so we had the day off from school and work. We decided to stay home and did not spend any money that day. 

For lunch on Monday I used up the last three salmon patties from the refrigerator. I had to cut open the bottle of tarter sauce to get the last bit out, but there was enough in there to cover the three sandwiches. I really wish they would design their bottle to make it easier to get the last little bit out of there, but until they do, this worked. 

I was able to work on Tuesday and then due to snow and cold temperatures we had a snow day on Wednesday and then again on Friday, so no school or work those days. 

I've actually ended the week with half a tank of gas leftover, which is very unusual for me, so this will be a savings for me this next week as well. 

Since we were at home Wednesday it was the perfect day to make homemade waffles. 

On Friday, since I had the day off from work, I scrubbed the kitchen down really well. I scrubbed the stove until it shined and swept and mopped the kitchen floor and vacuumed the rug in there. 

I brought sandwiches with me when we finally got out on Saturday afternoon for my daughter's weekly volunteer duty. Afterwards, we went to Publix to pick up a few essentials. 

At Publix, I was able to purchase milk for 5¢, believe it or not, there was a coupon in the Sunday paper recently for a free gallon of milk, up to $4.00, if you bought two boxes of cereal. I bought two boxes of Post Raisin Bran, on sale at 2 for $5.00 and the milk was $4.05, so for $5.05 I bought 2 boxes of cereal and 1 gallon of milk, which I thought was a pretty good deal. :)

And then to the Dollar Tree for another loaf of 54¢ bread. 

We hauled our own garbage to the county dumpsters for free instead of paying someone to do it for us.

All breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were eaten at or came from home this week. 

Dinners this week included:

Monday: Beans & Franks, Corn.
Tuesday: Loaded Baked Potatoes, Broccoli, Green Peas.
Wednesday: Pizza Pasta, Green Beans with Onions & Potatoes
Thursday: Leftovers from Tuesday & Wednesday
Friday: Sausage Quiche, Broccoli
Saturday: Soup Beans, Collard Greens, Cornbread
Sunday: Smoked Sausage, Beans & Greens, Cornbread

Snacks were homemade too and included popcorn. 

Now here we are on Sunday afternoon and I have the thermostat set on 65 degrees, although at 53 degrees outside, it is warmer outside today than any other day this past week. We are sitting here reading the Sunday paper and clipping the coupons. Today was a good coupon day with four inserts. 

How has your week been so far? What frugal things have you done this week?

Belinda
CFO ~ Chief Frugal Officer
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011-2014.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”

This Week's Menus

1.       Tacos

2.      Baked Potato Night

3.      Macaroni & Cheese with Ham, Green Beans  with Onions

4.      Vegetable Beef Soup

5.      Home Made Pizza

6.      Bean & Cheese Enchiladas, Mexican Rice

7.      Salmon Patties, Mashed Potatoes, Peas

 
Listed above is our menu for the next seven days. We had Tacos today and did not do the traditional black eyed peas for New Year's Day dinner. We have all of these foods on hand for this menu and do not have to go grocery shopping for anything to make these dinners. Sales advertisements do come out tomorrow though, and I will be checking those, but won't need to buy anything unless it is a good deal. 

My goals for this month include using up foods I have on hand for making meals rather than buying more food. And saving as much money as I can since I have added expenses this month for auto registration, Insurance membership, and automobile insurance. You'll notice two of our meals this week are meatless meals, which will help us save money as well.

Belinda
© Belinda Richardson and Frugal Workshop, 2011-2013.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”