Weekly Dinner Menus

Weekly dinner menus that make the most of your grocery dollars

Food, clothing and shelter are the three essentials in any household budget. Food costs can amount to a hefty portion of these necessary expenses. In times past, you might have been able to manage your grocery shopping without planning weekly dinner menus. Today, spending a half hour on this task prior to setting out for the grocery can pay big dividends. Let's see how.

If you use the seat-of-the-pants approach to your dinner menus, it's almost certain you'll be wasting food. For example, you don't plan, but just purchase the usual staples of your weekly dinners - some ground beef, chicken, a roast and some pork chops.

The ground beef is a two pound package intended for a family burger night. You're going to roast that whole chicken for another night, the roast will do one night as a pot roast, with enough leftover for - ? The pork chops fill in another spot on your weekly dinner menu. You figure for five night's meals and  assume you can squeeze another two out of the remainder.

How this strategy actually works out is another thing altogether. You end up with a half pound of burger left over, not enough to stretch into another meal. Had you made a weekly dinner menu plan, you might have looked for a package containing just a half pound more, enabling you to make tacos for one of those other nights.

You roast your chicken for a delightful repast one night, only to find the meat left over is on the wings. The roast idea works out OK for two meals worth. The pork chops? If you'd just gotten one more chop, you'd have enough for pork fried rice. As it stands, Fido got the leftovers, such as they were.

When you take the time to plan weekly dinner menus, you won't come up short. When planning menus, use your weekly grocery sales flyer to spot sale items around which you can organize your dinner choices.

If ground beef is on sale in the value pack, you can plan enough for one night of burgers and freeze the rest for a future week. If you're into do-ahead cooking, figure the amount required for a night of burgers, another for meat loaf and still another for tacos. Buy the amount you need while it's on sale. Divide your portions and pencil in these future dinner menus on your monthly calendar of menus.

If chicken is on sale, buy two and roast them at once. The leftover meat can produce another two meals when you plan your weekly dinner menus. Some can be used for a chicken chef's salad, with the remainder for chicken salad sandwiches with soup.

The bottom line here is that planning weekly dinner menus saves you money as well as time spent shopping. Isn't that the goal? Yes indeed.