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!
This week I’m participating in a challenge to only spend $1.50 per day on food for myself. Some nights I’ll be eating the same food as my family and other nights I won’t. I’ll try to blog nightly about what I ate for the day.
Be sure to link up to our Recipe Hop with your 5 ingredient dishes and enter to win a set of Country Gourmet cooking mixes.
This week we’ll be cooking (in no particular order):
Mac and Cheese, Hot Dogs, Green Beans and Bananas
Grilled BBQ Chicken Legs, Baked Beans, Creamed Corn
Grilled Northwoods Pork, Honey Toast, Pears, Sweet Peas
Baked Potatoes, Pigs in a Blanket (hot dogs) Fruit Cocktail and Broccoli with Cheese
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.
looking forward to reading about how this plays out this week
me too! Given the ease of feeding 4 of us on $5 a dinner (and usually y only half of what we cook for $5) I didn’t think it would be too hard. However, I’m up to $.77 for the day and I’m really craving M&Ms
I knew I should skip the half serving of Doritos at lunch LOL
Ahh I always forget we have the Little Caesar’s not too far from here with the cheap pizza and breadsticks. Thanks for the reminder! Great menu this week! -Kelly @ Semi Homemade Mom
Caesar’s is my go to meal for a busy night
My favorite pizza too! Thanks for stopping by Kelly.