The Question of the day.....

Everyday.

Mr: "What's for dinner?"
Me: "I don't know. What do you feel like?"
Mr: "What do we have?"
Me: "What's in the freezer."

I'm sure that sounds all to familiar to you too! I have those weeks when I am on the ball. I meal plan before heading to the grocery store to shop for the week. My problem is that I don't always plan as well as I should. I end up wandering around the store trying to come up with dinner ideas and then I end up having these types of annoying conversations with my husband anyways. The other problem is that I make the same dinners over and Over and OVER. Booooring.

What's a mom to do?? Sign up for a membership with e-mealz of course!!

I recently learned about e-mealz here. Thank you Gill! Seriously. After doing a little research I decided that I needed to try this thing out and I got started pronto.

This will be me starting this week!

Here's the jist of how it works....
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Sign up for a membership on the website. It will cost you a mere $15 every 3 months. So that's basically $5 a month or about $1.25 a week.

This membership buys you a menu consisting of 7 meals for the week every week. All you do is log in on the site every week to retrieve your menu and shopping list. Yes, I said shopping list! All the meals are easily laid out and your shopping list items have a reference # that lets you know what meal it is for. So if you don't want to use a particular meal you just cross off those items that correspond to that meal's #. It's fabulous!

You even get to select the types of meals you want. For instance, you can choose from low fat, low carb, weight watchers points, and some other eating plans I am not familiar with. You also choose if your meals need to feed 2 people or 4-6 people. You can change these options as you go along.

This is supposed to be a very budget friendly system. The site also has a section that is devoted to using coupons and links to some great sites to get coupons for items you need.

This is sooooo worth $5 bucks a month to me!! I am really interested to see just how much mula we can save by meal planning consistently. And I am hoping to eliminate those trips to the store for needed items between the weekly grocery shopping trips I do. Expensive.

I have been tracking our spending in an attempt to find out where we can trim excess spending. Groceries is at the top of my list. For the month of June we spent $450 at the grocery store. And then there was a Costco trip that totaled about $200 in food items. The bad part about this is that in our household there are only 2 adults, 1 toddler who does not eat much and a nursing baby who is just starting to eat some solids! I'm thinking there's plenty of room for change here!

For starters, I've decided to allot $100 cash a week to use towards food. And Costco falls into that as well. Yikes! I may have to make some adjustments to the amount once I get started. (I hope less!) Once it's gone, it's gone. So I better plan well and skip those unnecessary items. I guess I better make sure to leave Aubrey home too!

So today I headed to Winco with my weekly shopping list and coupons.....that I forgot to use! I hate that! My total was $34 for ALL my dinner items. Like Gill, I picked out 4 meals from my menu for this week. I did pick up some other dinner things as well for next week to go with stuff we already have in the freezer, breakfast and lunch stuff and some snack things. So the grand total was $101 for everything, including some non grocery items. But I think we are good to go for the next 2 weeks. I will just have to restock the fresh fruits and veggies next week.

So here is what's for dinner this week:

• Ranch Chicken, steamed broccoli, orange almond salad and rolls

• Italian baked pork chops, tomato and mozzarella salad w/ greens and bread

• Crock-pot Portabella roast, salad and bread

• Teriyaki Salmon & Chicken (for the non fish eater...muah), steamed veggies, rice and salad

It was exhilarating in a weird kind of penny pincher way to know that I am really gettin' our grocery bill under control. It's just so easy to spend a lot of money when all I do is swipe my card here and there. Most of the time I never even pay attention to the total. I just swipe away! But my thinking is that handing over cold hard cash will make me think twice before I drop something into the cart that is not on my shopping list. I'm curious to know what you do to keep on track. Do you have a budget you stick too or blow regularly?

Just scroll up a little bit and look on the right side of the blog to find the link to the website. Click on it and get started! I will keep you updated on the progress we make as we go along.