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Monday, March 12, 2018

Cheap & Cheerful meals for this past week

It's been a while since I made one of these meal posts. That's a large part due to the hodge-podge nature of meal-planning in our house for the last couple of months. But, here goes. I think I've remembered this past week's meals.

Saturday
cheddar cheese pizza
cole slaw

Sunday
roasted chicken
roasted vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onions)

Monday
chicken on fried corn tortillas, topped with cheese and salsa
green peas

Tuesday
chicken and vegetable soup
focaccia (using leftover dough from Saturday's pizza, kept in the fridge)

Wednesday
chicken, vegetables, and dumplings

Thursday
stir fry of smoked chicken sausage, tofu, asparagus, celery, carrots, and garlic, with a liberal amount of toasted sesame oil (very, very delicious meal)
steamed brown rice

Friday
baked beans
cornbread
baked carrots
pickled beets (turned out to be spiced cranberry jelly -- I should really label these things!)

Saturday
barley and lentil salad
fry bread
gifted, leftover cake

Sunday
sausage and veggie soup
cheese quesadillas

Monday
leftover soup
fried corn tortillas
baby carrots and dip

A week and a half of very basic meals, based on basic ingredients (with the exception of the asparagus).

Conventional frugal living wisdom says to make your week's meal plans, then go shopping for ingredients. This type of thought process is especially helpful for the individual who doesn't know how to shop for basic meal ingredients which can be transformed into many different dishes.

Imagine if you were completely new to shopping for a household's groceries, and you didn't have a good grasp on what a family might eat in a week, or what ingredients would go into family favorite meals. You might wander up and down each aisle trying to decide what you wanted to eat, there on the spot. (BTW, this was exactly how my husband and I used to shop when we were first married. When you're poor newlyweds, grocery shopping easily becomes "date night.") This could be disastrous to your budget (which is was), and may not be enough meal ingredients to get through a week (which happened to us on many occasions), necessitating those extra stops at the market mid-week. So, planning a week's meals, then deciding what you need to make them, does make a lot of sense for households that just don't have a grasp, yet, on what a kitchen needs to be well-stocked.

However, I would hazard to guess that most of us, here, already know what our pantries need to have in them so that we can make several meals. This is how I shop. I keep my pantry filled with meal-making supplies, then I plan what we'll eat based on what I have. I like to think that this is the way people have made meals since the beginning of cooking. They ate from what they found, trapped, or hunted. They didn't create elaborate meal plans based on foods they didn't have, then go out hunting and searching for these foods. It's not an efficient use of energy to begin a meal plan with a dream, instead of ingredients on hand. Imagine the poor cave man who got sent out to find squab in caribou-hunting season, all so his lovely cave-bride could perform her culinary miracles over the open fire, and serve up a delicate and romantic meal under the stars.

Anyway (getting way off topic) the meals that we make in our house are almost always on the humble side, so humble that when there is a "very, very delicious" meal of a stir fry, it really stands out. I hope that your meals have been equally simple and satisfying in your home.

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