Leftovers are Lovely

I love making my life easier. One way I do that is by organizing my meals around the same ingredients. Every week I plan out our menu in advance minimizing the amount of food needed to buy at the grocery store. The results are easy on the pocketbook, even easier on a hectic schedule, and yeld delicious meals! I always feel so proud of myself at the end of the week having a completely bare fridge because we've used up all of the food to make only necessary "planned" meals. But how do you get started? Do you have something in the fridge that needs to be used up and seems like a random ingredient? Well go for it! It will have a dominoe effect. Just you wait and see.

Take my fridge for instance. I had whole grain mustard that obviously would just sit and sit unless I pre-planned my meals. So I made the most awesome Grilled Chicken I've ever tasted! But I still had more mustard left that I wanted to uses up and more frozen chicken breasts. So I built our menu around these things So here's an example of what I do [my shopping list and menu]:

Weekly Menu:
Sunday: Mustard Dill Chicken, roasted potatoes, & artichokes
Monday: Tomato Broccoli Chicken Salad, chips, & fruit
Tuesday: Marinated Tomatoes in Angel Hair, Cesaer Salad, Fresh Bread
Wednesday: Tomato Brocoli Chicken Salad {tweek and put 'em on buns}
Thursday: Hamburgers {use the extra buns}, corn, potato salad {use leftovers}
Friday: date night!

Shopping List:
-bag of red potatoes
-corn
-yellow onion
-celery
-carrot
-artichokes
-grape tomatoes
-romaine lettuce
-basil
-taragon
-fruit
-french bread
-buns
-lunch meat
-then the weekly staples like: milk, yogurt, eggs, cereal, lunch items

Notice how the list consists of all fresh ingredients? That's all I have to buy because all the other items would already been in short term food storage: pasta, chips, oil, chicken stalk, frozen broccoli, frozen chicken etc.

We save A TON of money doing our meals and shopping in this fashion. Plus, I never have to think... "What's for dinner?"



P.S. I've taken a step further by planning my menu for 3 months (so that I can have only the necessary pantry items on hand) in advance...but this is a whole other post...