Meal planning (and free printable!)

I've always been a meal planner. I love making lists, organizing recipes (pinterest has been a HUGE help with this), and saving money. We have a simple dry erase calendar on our fridge where I write our meals for the month. Until recently, we have stayed on top of our grocery budget just by simply planning the meals ahead of time. However, we have had some changes that have increased our budget. I have been more adventurous in my cooking and we have incorporated meat back into our menu (I was a vegetarian, due to environmental reasons, for quite a few years). This led me to reconsider how we meal plan.


There was probably an easier way to do this, but because I am ridiculous, I spent some time in my local grocery store with a pad of paper and I literally wrote down the exact prices of everything I normally buy. I got a lot of very strange stares, but it was completely worth it! Yes, the prices of grocery items do change quite frequently, but I now have a general guideline for my grocery list each week. I then made up a pricing sheet, matching my printables below, which I refer to when I make my lists. Not only does this give me a guideline for each grocery shop, I usually come under budget due to sales or coupons.

I then decided to take this one step further. I went through all of my recipes and organized them by price, not type. I took my pricing sheet and used it to determine the cost of each of my recipes (by serving sizes). Now I have a binder with my most commonly used recipes that are organized by the least expensive, to the most expensive. I couldn't find a printable that fit my needs, so I made my own.

I made two versions. One for really easy recipes that I really don't need recipes for, such as taco salad, and the other for more complicated recipes with directions I need to follow. If you would like to download these for yourselves, click on the images.

Now when I create my menus, I plan out the month with mostly cheaper recipes and a couple more expensive recipes. With the help of my recipe pages and my pricing list, I hope to save quite a bit of money each time I go grocery shopping!