My new meal planning strategy

So, I wrote in the past about how I meal plan, and that has worked great for me for a long time. Lately, I haven't been feeling very creative or industrious in the kitchen, so I've had a hard time coming up with meal ideas for us.

For a little while, I was trying to simply keep our pantry stocked with the items we needed to make all of our basic favorite recipes. That worked okay at first, but I found that it was hard to stay within budget that way, for some reason. Also, without a plan to hold me accountable, I had a lot more days where it got close to dinnertime and I had no idea what we were going to eat.

Last week, I just stole someone else's meal plan ideas. :)

I love the blog Heavenly Homemakers, and she posts her family's meal plans at the beginning of each week. I really like her recipes because she makes a lot of comfort foods and healthy versions of familiar foods. Also, she does a lot of freezer cooking and her family eats a lot, so her recipes are usually enough for at least 2 meals for us.

At the end of this week, I had several meals in the freezer and we had eaten leftovers a few times, so I will probably cook the rest of the meals from her meal plan the first half of next week. I loved that a lot of things could be done ahead of time  because, with two babies under two years old, I have to be really flexible with my time.

The food was good, too! We had barbeque chicken legs, asian stir fry, breakfast burritos, pumpkin bread, beef and noodle soup, and a few recipes that I was excited about and didn't get to try.

Overall, I spent about $200 and it ended up being enough for 2 weeks worth of food, so I spent the same amount that I usually do for a week's worth of groceries.

Here's her meal plan for last week, and it has links to all of her recipes! She said she ended up getting the flu this weekend, so she hasn't posted a full meal plan for this week.

It was fun for me getting to try so many new recipes! What have you been cooking this week? Fall is here, so it's time for baking! :)