Planning - An introduction to meal planning

     When it comes down to it, the only way to guarantee that you can keep your food on budget is to plan and plan and plan and plan.  In my experience, the best way to go over budget is to buy food day-to-day without any forethought.  It might seem more convenient, but you'll end up either having to buy more than you need or buy multiple portions of something that would've been cheaper at a larger quantity.  Your first step should be planning your meals for at least the next week.  Go get a notebook that you can write everything down in and use my day off, Sunday, to plan out a week.
     On a scrap piece of paper, make a quick table:

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday

       In those spots, write the protein you'd like to use that day. Depending on your family's nutritional restrictions, you can make this pretty easily. My family has no dietary restrictions, so I like to vary our protein. That means my table looks something like this:

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Chicken	Pork	Beef	Fish	Chicken	Beef	Leftovers

      See the variation?  Pretty simple.  You make it work for you and your family.  You don't always need a leftover night; you may not get good fish where you are, or you might keep kosher and not eat pork.  Whatever works for you is what works for you.
     Now that you have a good idea of what type of meat you're going to eat, it's time to find your recipes.  My first step in this is to look in my cabinets, pantry, and freezer to see what I already have on hand.  That makes a big difference on what I'm going to make.  Remember, it's always cheaper when you don't have to buy anything!
     The ingredient search on Allrecipes.com makes this step go a lot faster.  If you know what non-protein items you have, you can plug a few into the "ingredients to include section" and put anything you know your family won't eat in the "ingredients to exclude" section.  Press search and see what comes up.  If nothing, remove ingredients until something does.  Find recipes that will fit your needs and write down the ingredients and directions in your notebook.  (Or print them and paste them in.)  Later, when you make the recipe, you can make notes as to how you liked the taste, what you'd change next time and how difficult it was.  Eventually, you'll have your own personal set of recipes that you can go to at the beginning of a week.  These are all recipes you know you've made before and if your family liked them or not.
     One of my favorite ways to find recipes is the Allrecipes dinner spinner.  This is a free app available for android (and I assume iPhone) that lets you completely randomize what shows up for dinner or select things you know you absolutely want.  For example, when I'm looking for dinner, I select "Main Dish" from  the category section and "45 min or less" in the time section.  Then I let the app randomize my main ingredient.  If I don't like what comes up, I go back and spin again.


Scan here to download Dinner Spinner for android

     Once you have your 6 or 7 recipes for the week, get out your shopping list.  Go through each recipe and write down each ingredient you don't have in the house.  Write down the quantities next to them.  When you find a duplicate item, mark out the previous quantity and put down a new one.  Here's how a typical shopping list for just me looks:

     Now you have everything you need to get through the week written down.  You know how often you'll use each of those ingredients, so if you have one that you use a lot, assess if a larger amount would save you more in the long run.  Next week, I'll talk about how to organize your list so that you can get your shopping done quickly and with little excess spending.

What do you do to plan your budget? Comments? Questions? Tweet to @cookingcheap