Meal planning- saves money & reduces stress

Do you meal plan? Would you like to?

I've found that planning meals not only helps save money but it also helps alleviate some stress.

Recently a friend of mine shared this site with me that I've found to be FABULOUS and have only used once so far since learning about it.

Thank you Lyndsey at Super NoVa Saver for sharing Food on the Table with me. It has helped tremendously already.

When I signed up I used a code, FEBFREE, not sure if it is still live but enter it when you sign up, because if it is, you'll get it for FREE and won't be limited to 3 meals a week.

One of the great things about the site is that you get to choose what kinds of foods you want recipes for. You can choose what type of meat you want or if you prefer recipes without meat that's available too. You get to select what type of dishes you like best.

You also get to choose if you want gluten free recipes, vegetarian, low carb, low fat or low sodium. Now you don't have to always have those, you can choose if you want those type of recipes always, some times or no restrictions on them. How great is that?!

You select your top 3 stores that you shop at and it will find the sales for that store for the items on your list. Oh that's another thing, it will get your grocery list together for you AND include the recipe that you can have printed and put into a binder for safe keeping for the future.

Of course if you decide that you don't really like it, you can always throw it out and not use it again.

I went to Walmart after printing out my grocery list and recipes so that I could keep my recipes organized and easily accessible for when I'm in a rush to figure out what's for dinner. I got a 1" binder, 5 subject divider sheets and a 3-hole hole punch for under $12.00.

I have my recipes separated by the following: beef, chicken, other, turkey and a blank one at the moment. You can obviously sort yours how you'd like. I'm thinking of changing my "other" one to appetizers and filling in the blank with desserts as I sit here and type this.

Since I printed enough recipes to last for 2 weeks worth of dinners, I had the grocery list for such too. It was a LOT of chicken as that's what our family eats the most. I decided it was best to separate it into ziplocs to freeze. I wrote the name of the recipe and the amount of chicken needed on the ziploc, then rinsed the chicken and placed the amount needed in the coordinating ziploc.


Here is my binder I purchased. I took a regular white piece of card stock as I had it on hand, wrote on it to label it for me and slid it in there.

Here is a photo to show the dividing tabs and recipes in the binder

Just an example of one of the recipes I chose to make for my family.

Quick snap shot of SOME of the meat I purchased on my grocery shopping trip. I hope you can see the names of the recipes and then to the side how much chicken and specified if it was breasts or thighs.