Plan Your Meals to Save Time and Money

Plan Your Meals to Save Time and Money

From the new book Get Organized Today,  custom kitchen planner, Tina Oscar, talks about ways to conquer the kitchen chaos and create healthy meals fast in her chapter “Conquering Kitchen Chaos”.

Spend a day cooking family-size meals and dividing them into single servings. This will save you not only time and money but also increase the odds that you’ll eat healthier. Much better than grazing through the kitchen at night.

The most common complaint I hear from people is that they don’t have time to cook. Consequently, budget busters such as ordering pizza, fast food drive-throughs and prepared foods become the norm for dining. You can reverse this habit. Get your budget and your health back into control by making a few simple changes. Would you be willing to invest one day a month to ensure that you and your family eat nutritious and cost-effective meals for the entire month? I bet you would!

First, print out a calendar of the month divided into breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

If you have children who eat lunch at school, you might even want to pencil in what they’re having for lunch. That eliminates a meltdown when they discover that you’ve planned the same thing for dinner that they just ate for lunch.

Thinking of your family’s favorite meals, begin determining what you’ll prepare for which nights. Be mindful of nights that are busy with extra-curricular activities by placing an easy-to-prepare meal on those nights. By doing this, you’ll be able to have a variety of meals. Continue doing the same thing for breakfast and lunch.

Using your calendar and recipes, begin to determine what ingredients you’ll need to buy and the quantities. With the proper storage containers in the kitchen, you can buy the majority of your food—even produce—in one shopping trip.

Normally, the fewer trips you make to the grocery store each month, the less money you’ll spend. Otherwise, those impulse purchases and end-cap specials will wreak havoc on your budget. If you have remarkable self-restraint, you can actually save money by shopping the weekly ads. You’ll find that one week beef is on sale. The next week, chicken is on sale and the next week pork will be on sale. If you buy a month’s worth of beef the first week, a month’s worth of chicken the next week, and a month’s worth of pork the third, you will buy when it’s on sale and start a cycle where every month you replace your inventory with the item on sale. However, this system will only produce savings for the disciplined shopper who is not tempted by the extra bag of chips or other non-essential purchases.

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Janet Schiesl

Janet Schiesl

Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.

She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.

Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.

Janet Schiesl

Janet Schiesl

Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.

She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.

Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.

4 Comments

  1. Basic Organization on December 10, 2010 at 1:32 pm

    Yes. The temptation to eat out is reduced when you have a plan for dinner.
    I plan a weeks worth of dinners (around our schedules) and shop only once a week. It saves me time and money in the long run and ends that nagging question “What’s for dinner?”

  2. Juli Monroe on December 10, 2010 at 1:25 pm

    Since our son went to college, we are more often cooking larger meals and having left overs the next day. It does make cooking and shopping easier. And the temptation to eat out is much reduced when there’s something in the fridge to just pop into the microwave.

  3. Say Mmm on December 10, 2010 at 7:58 pm

    Looks like a good book. Putting a meal plan together definitely helps save time and money. Good point about not having time, as most people feel this way, and its key to realize that spending a little bit of time getting organized can save you a lot of time throughout the week.

  4. Basic Organization on December 10, 2010 at 9:01 pm

    I agree, time getting organized is time well spent. I found that I also eat more balanced meals, because I spend a moment thinking about it. If you’d like to buy the book, please visit basicorganization.com.

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