Update on Meal Plan experiment

It hasn't been long enough to know whether we are saving any money but I am noticing a few new things.

1) I am a lot less stressed about dinner. It gets a little wobbly when we have friends come over all of a sudden and I have either planned a meal for 2 people (i.e. no leftovers) or a meal that our guests may not like. Brian and I tend to be a bit more..adventurous? Fancy? in our cooking and our friends not so much (which is totally fine). I can find out that a friend is coming over for dinner that day so a tweak and move around in the meals can be a bit tough in that sense.

However, that situation is a lot better then what we were facing. We were facing, at first, not knowing what we were going to do for dinner. We would start asking "what are we doing for dinner" at about 4 pm or so, start looking for what we could put together with what we had and all of a sudden it is 8pm and we have come up with nothing. We weren't being all that smart with how we decided what we were going to get at the grocery store. We started out in the beginning just writing a list of things as we ran out. That was fine except that lead to us having some of the ingredients for one meal but not everything. It also lead to us not having enough food with left overs or eating the same thing over and over again.

We finally got sick of that and so I tried to create weekly menu's. That worked..and it didn't work. Towards the beginning of that experiment I was picking recipes that we had been collecting but never tried. That was really yummy but got expensive depending on the recipe. I won't call that a failure as some of our favorite repeat recipes are from that time frame. I then figured out that the issue wasn't trying new recipes but that the recipes were of things where we had nothing already in the house to make them except for maybe spices. So we started trying to pick recipes by what we had in the house so that when we did go to the grocery store we were getting the small things rather then EVERYTHING for 5 recipes. We would still find a random recipe that included ingredients we didn't have and make it but it wasn't an every recipe or even once a week thing. Another struggle with this technique is that, at the time, Brian's and my schedules kept changing so recipes kept getting bumped. And at the very end I was making recipes that made too many leftovers. I say this worked because we did find some great recipes and figured out we were on the right path and it didn't work because we couldn't stick to it and our process needed tweaking some more.

Now we are trying this. So far so good. We are still having to tweak what meal gets eaten when but so far everything is evening itself out. I don't have to wonder what we are doing for dinner or if we even have enough ingredients to make a meal for that night with enough for left overs.

2) Because that stress is not there, I am enjoying cooking more. Because I enjoy cooking more, Brian is not doing much cooking. The dishes are being done a lot faster and easier. And we are so far, having just the right amount of left overs. It is no longer a chore which is very nice.

Hopefully this system makes sense monetarily wise as well. I am realizing that in terms of produce, we will need to do that every 2 weeks. The first shopping trip with include the meats, dry items, dairy and half the produce and then 2 weeks later I will get the rest of the produce for the month. My zucchini got wet and so two of them were so bad that I couldn't save them. Oh well, live and learn right? :)