I'm hosting a challenge! I am SO excited about this.
Sara of I Like to Cook started the Weekend Cookbook Challenge. I love this addition to the many great foodblogger events out there because it's really easy for me to let my cookbooks gather dust while I work my way through all the inspiring recipes people post around me. The WCC reminds me of all the great cookbooks that I have and gives me a good reason to hit them at least once a month. There are dreams deferred in there, people! Dreams deferred!
So the theme I chose for my WCC, naturally, is $40 a Week! Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: plan a week's worth of meals that cost you US$40 per person or less. Make one thing from your meal plan (or follow the whole plan!) and share it with us.
I'm going to tell you all the stuff that is involved in making a meal plan, and post tips and other information about it all month long. This is a great opportunity to try meal planning if you don't do it normally: I've found that just the act of figuring out what I want to eat over the next week and buying only that food saves me a ton of money, and I save even more if I figure out how much it will cost and try to stick within $40. It can seem like a lot of work if you are not used to it, but it is well worth it!
Here are the steps I take to create my meal plan for the week:
1. Check out what ingredients I have lying around that I might want to use.
2. Check out what leftovers I have.
3. Think about what I have been wanting to cook or eat. (Have I been craving comfort foods? Did I see a couple of good recipes on someone's blog that I've been meaning to make? Do I keep swearing that I will go to the farmer's market and do something with figs before the season is over? (Answer to that last one: yes.))
4. Figure out how many meals of leftovers I have and how many meals the different things I want to make will provide. (The way I think about it is that I need 7 breakfasts and 14 lunch-or-dinners in a given week.)
5. Start writing down what ingredients I need to buy for each meal and guesstimating how much each one will cost, overestimating if I am not sure.
6. Fiddle with the list. (Maybe I am way over $40 and I need to switch out a more expensive meal for something I know is cheap. Maybe it costs the right amount, but after making it I realize every single meal is composed almost entirely of cheese. Maybe it was all fine but then I remembered that I'm eating out four times this week, at parties or restaurants, and don't actually need this much food.)
7. Sketch out a plan for when I am eating which meals. (I don't have to stick to this, but it helps me see when I need to cook a given dish in order to have it on hand for eatin', so that I'm not stuck on Monday with a whole mess of ingredients and no actual Food. It also helps me see if I did my math wrong on how many meals I was making, and to be honest with myself about how much food I am actually going to prepare.)
8. Go grocery shopping!
In theory, anyway. In practice, I often leave out step one. I do have noodles and canned soup and tahini and stuff on hand, but it all keeps so I'm not that worried about using it up. It's more often the case that I see a recipe and go "oh, it uses tahini and I already have that! That makes it even more affordable!"
So, your goal is to do all of that, post the meal plan, and post about at least one recipe you make from a cookbook of your choice. I'd most especially love to hear how the process worked for you, though! Did it give you the opportunity to eat more food you wanted, more vegetables, to save money, to spend more than you usually do, to eat out a lot less, to eat on time instead of starting to cook (or order pizza) when you are already hungry?
Oh and by the way: you can totally do this for more than a week at a time. I have found that a week works best for me for two reasons: (1) it is such a pain to figure out what I want to eat for fourteen whole days at a time, and (2) somehow when I focus in on just a week I save even more money. I still don't understand why, but instead of having a hard time fitting it all in at $40 per week I suddenly find myself adding everything up and coming up with a total of $28-$32 dollars a lot of the time.
I used to avoid weekly meal plans because I thought going to the grocery store was too frustrating and time-consuming to do every week, but of course it was frustrating and time-consuming when I was buying two weeks' worth of ingredients! I always had to go to about three different stores because one had much the cheapest cream but everything else was wildly expensive (I am looking at you, Whole Foods) and one had everything else cheap but produce and one had all the produce.... Turns out, when I am just buying what I need for the week, I can often get it all at one store. Like, maybe there's one single thing on the list that I could get cheaper somewhere else, and I can afford to get the more expensive bread or artichokes or what-have-you because it's still under $40 altogether. And because it's just a week's worth of stuff, I can shop so much faster! We have really, really crowded grocery stores around here, too, and shopping for just a short list of ingredients really cuts down on me wanting to kill everyone who is blocking the aisles. Because, you know, I have time.
I'll be posting a lot more information about how meal planning works over the next month, as well as my usual recipes, cooking, and meal plans for myself; watch this space!
