Real Food Menu Plan

I am not one for planning. But in an effort to simplify my life and perhaps do a bit of budget control on food items I agreed to give menu planning and grocery listing a chance. Most people know I like to just look at what I have on hand and create a dinner. I also don't normally have a set day to do my grocery shopping, I just go on a whim. Sometimes that means a few times a week. Which gets expensive. So this morning I sat down and took about 45 minutes to lay out a menu plan, list out ingredients, figure out which ones I had and which ones I needed. At first I was so focused on dinners I forgot to add in grocery list items for breakfast and lunch. My goal is to hopefully eat leftovers for lunch, but I also made sure there were some easy lunches to have available too. The grocery  list is for what I need at Sprouts (my local small health food grocer.) A lot of the meat for the meals is either in my freezer or I get from a local rancher through a meat-buy club. I buy about half of my meat that way these days. Perhaps the more I control the budget the more I can buy from the rancher instead of from the supermarket.

Anyway, I want to share my menu/list with you. I know it isn't anything new, I'm probably the last person on the planet to get on board with menu planning but it's new to me. This week I did not plan any new dishes for The Frickin Chicken. I actually went through my archives and pulled up some old dishes. One (the salmon) dish, I'm reworking to have heavy cream instead of fat-free half and half. I mostly planned low-carb, but I did include one dish with white rice. I also decided on two salads because it is summer and it's getting hot here in Texas. How do you do your planning/shopping??

Click here for a link to the PDF.

Update: The menu planning is going so great this week! I even costed out a a few of the dinners and found that each serving was from $2.50-3.00 per person! People think eating real food is expensive, but it doesn't have to be. For instance I know going out to dinner for most of these meals would be a $12-$14 plate of food per person. I'm linking this post to Kelly the Kitchen Kops Real Food Wednesdays!