Now that you know there is no right or wrong way to plan a menu, I’ll continue on today with some more tips that will really cut your grocery bill down!
Shop your pantry – By pantry I mean your cupboards, freezer, fridge and anywhere else you may have some food hidden. I’m pretty sure this is how I personally save the most money each week at the grocery store. By looking in my cupboards, I can see how many ingredients I have on hand already that could create a meal. For example, today I found that I have some chicken, some cream cheese, a can of chicken soup and some spices to create a ranch flavour which I though I could turn into Cream Cheese chicken. I don’t have to buy anything additional to create that meal since I also have rice and a few veggies on hand.
There are a few great websites out there that will come up with some recipes for the ingredients you already have on hand. All Recipes is one of them. Simply input the ingredients you have and the ingredients you don’t have and it will pull up a list of recipes you could make! Recipe Matcher and Food.com (find the recipe sifter in the top right hand corner, orange button) are also good resources!
Now that you’ve shopped your pantry, and know how many meals you can create with what you have on hand, it’s time to fill in the spaces by consulting the store flyers.
Browse the store flyers- Take a look at your store flyers to see if there are any fantastic deals on items you need or could use over the next couple of months. Ground beef may be on sale so you could stock up for the next month or so and incorporate an meal for your menu using some of that ground beef. Most of the the best deals can be found on the front page of the flyer. With this technique, the stores are trying to lure you into shopping at that store. There are good deals on the inside pages as well, so don’t forget to check that out too. Also, remember that just because something in listed in the flyer doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good deal. Over time, you’ll start to learn what’s truly a good deal.
If you don’t receive your store flyers in your mail or newspapers, most of them are available online.
Have theme nights- Maybe this should have been with last week’s tips on menu planning, but it’s here now! Theme Nights are another great way to plan a menu. Sunday’s could be soup nights, Tuesday’s could be Mexican and Friday’s could be Italian! Or the way I like to do it is plan to have a couple of chicken nights, a beef night, a pasta night and a vegetarian night. Adds a bit of variety so were not always eating our favourite…chicken. 
Stay tuned for the next post in this series on Friday!
Have you got any menu planning tips that will help others? If you’re not a menu planner, are you willing to give it a try?
I had never heard of recipe matcher, it’s so fantastic, thank you for posting this!!
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