Planning your Dinner Menu for the week.

One of the ways to reduce your grocery bills, as well as keep your sanity is to plan your dinner menu for the week before you go grocery shopping so that you only go to the grocery store once a week.

There are 2 ways of doing this.

The first is to review the sale flyer's and plan your menu for the week depending on what is on sale.
The other is to create a months worth of dinner menus, with associated grocery lists that you store and reuse from week to week, on a 4 week rotation.

Personally I prefer the first method for 2 reasons. I find that I save more money if I plan my dinner menus based on the sales, and I like the creativity that comes with planning the menu. I enjoy cooking, therefore one of the things that I enjoy to so is to get inspired by what I see in the flyer's.

Either way is effective, because what you are trying to achieve is to minimize the amount of times you go to the grocery store. Statistics show that every time an individual enters a grocery store they are likely to purchase 2 to3 items that they were not initially planning to purchase. Based on this static, the bag of milk you were picking up ends up costing your 3 times what it should, because you purchased cookies that you saw in the bakery, and that chocolate bar at the checkout. If you enter the grocery store one extra time a week to pick up a few items, you will be spending approximately $520 additional dollars a year, which you could be saving towards that family vacation.

Some tips on how to make this effective.

• plan your menu
• print off all of your recipes and have them in a binder in your Kitchen available for reference.
• Create your Grocery list based on your recipes and ensure you include EVERYTHING that you require to complete those recipes either at home, or on your grocery list to purchase.
• Create your menu based on using fresh ingredients earlier in the week (i.e. fresh veggies) and use Frozen later in the week.
• Be flexible when creating your menu to substitute items based on what is on sale. If Frozen broccoli is on sale, and you have a coupon and the fresh is not on sale, the frozen may be less expensive to purchase. If you are adding the broccoli to a recipe, you will never know the difference on whether you are using fresh or frozen in the end. ( Frozen vegetables are usually more nutritious then fresh and they are quick frozen at the peak of freshness, where as the fresh may have been picked under ripe, traveled 300 miles before you purchase it)
  
• If you purchase certain items every week, i.e. Milk Yogurt, Bread, create a template grocery list with those staple items already on the list. When you are creating your menu and completing your grocery list review those items and determine whether you actually need them that week or not. It is easier to just cross that item off a created list if you do not need the item than to prepare a new list every week with those staple items.
• If you are planning on having a dinner in your menu plan that requires fresh bread or rolls, purchase them on your weekly grocery shopping and freeze them as soon as you get home. Take the item out of the freezer the morning you are planning on having it for dinner. It will taste as fresh as it would have the day you brought it home.
• Prepare your dinner menu based on how much time you have to make dinner each night and include days that you are planning on going out for dinner instead. For instance, if on Tuesdays you have to take the kids to soccer and you know that you only have 15 minutes to prepare dinner that night, plan a dinner that will be easy and quick to make. Use your crockpot that night, or maybe you will have make your own sub night. The point is to think about your week and plan your menu based on the time you have available to prepare dinner every night.
• Save yourself time by prepping your items that day you bring them home from the grocery store. i.e. cut up Chicken into strips or cubes for menus that you have planned. Place in a freezer bag and flatten. One less step you need to do when you get home and need to make dinner.
• Think of Cook once, eat twice meals on your menu. Roast a chicken for Sunday Dinner and then use the leftover chicken later in the week for Wraps, or maybe a casserole.
  

It may seem daunting to think that you need to spend all this time preparing your menu and doing all this planning. The truth is, if you plan your week, you actually save time and money as you are not trying to determine what you are going to make for dinner that day and you are not making those unnecessary last minute trips to the grocery store. If it takes you 3o minutes to create your menu for the week as apposed to spending 10 to 20 minutes everyday either trying to determine what to make, or running to the grocery store, which is actually taking your more time?

I hope these tips will help you with your grocery shopping and of course save you money !