My goal is to provide dinner for my family for an average of $5 except on special occasions. We don’t have to eat beans and rice to accomplish this goal! I shop the grocery sales each week. Then I plan my menu based on the foods I have already at home (at a great price). I balance more expensive meals with less expensive ones. We typically only cook a main dish 4 or 5 times a week. Each main dish cooked will serve 4-6, and the leftovers will be for easy dinners on the weekend, or to freeze for another week. This cuts down on cleaning, cooking, and meal planning- saving at us lots of time!
You may notice a theme of grilled this week. Hubby grilled up about 25 pounds of meat on Friday night, so my freezer is well stocked and I only have to actually cook and clean the kitchen 1 night this week! I’m telling ya- freezer cooking is the life!
Be sure to check out our Dishing It Up Casserole Recipe Hop.
This week we’ll be cooking (in no particular order):
Grilled Hot Dogs, Fresh Pears, Potato Chips and Brownies
Grilled BBQ Chicken Legs, Baked Beans, Sweet Peas
Grilled Chicken Salads, Carrot Sticks with Ranch (Chicken Nuggets for Little One)
Salmon Croquets with Pineapple and Green Beans
Little Caesar’s Pizza and Apple Slices
For 2012, I will no longer be showing the cost breakdown for our meals. This is very time consuming and for little purpose since I’ve spent the past 18 months showing that a family of 4 could eat for an average of $5 per dinner. If you’d like to see some $5 menu ideas with cost breakdowns, please browse my pages for $5 Dinner Plans.
This post is being linked up to Menu Plan Monday over at OrgJunkie.
We’ve converted you! Woohoo. LOL You know, I’ve never actually thought to have my husband grill up a bunch of meat. It make’s so much sense though with the time of heating up the pit and the amount of charcoal used to just make one dinner. I’m definitely going to have him do that this weekend. We’ve got steaks and pork chops and leg quarters int he freezer that I didn’t feel like messing with this week. Sounds like a great plan for Saturday! =)
I’ll be using Bumble Bee salmon this time. It does have bones, but it comes off pretty easily if you buy the 14.5 oz can. The bones are pretty thin and you can eat them. Sounds weird, but true. Chicken of the Sea (pink cans) are boneless and skinless. They’re pricier but easier to work with. We use Chef Tim’s recipe from Brookshire’s on Rice. I never liked my hubby’s but I liked Chef Tim’s.
Which salmon do you use for your croquets? I wanted to make some desperately a few years back, but when I opened the can and realized there were BONES involved…well I was pregnant at the time and I just couldn’t stomach picking the bones out lol
Awesome! I bought HoneyBoy (?)…and it was AWFUL. There was like an entire fish spine in there LOL. Anyway…sounds so good right now for some reason