Eating well by planning with little money or time

Unfortunately as I was preparing this month's article on eating well and planning my time and money became even sparser. While not good personally, it did give me even more ideas about planning and preparing good food on a tight budget with no time. Another thing that I came to realize was that even if a meal sounded not so great in the planning stage, coming home to it already cooked made it taste better than it sounded. To explain that further, when I put what I had in the fridge into the crock pot yesterday morning it did not look very appetizing. In fact, the thought of bean soup and rolls sounded pretty bad. But when I just had to put the crock on the table and dinner was ready, it tasted pretty good. One more thing that I thought was really interesting. The less time and money I spent on food, the more my kids liked it.

So here is how to do it. There are a couple of approaches. One is to buy in bulk and plan all your meals around that item. For example, I purchased 6 pounds of hamburger at my local warehouse store for $11.00. I am told that if you go to the stores in the morning you can get meat that they are selling cheaper because it did not sell the day it was packaged. It is still fine to eat or freeze. With that 6 pounds of meat I was able to make hamburgers, taco's, spaghetti, chili, meat loaf, enchiladas, hamburger noodle casserole (my kids favorite), and lasagna. Another approach is to buy in bulk and freeze. For some tips on freezing and home preservations the University of Nebraaska's Cooperative Extension has some great information. This way if you build up a freezer of food purchased on sale, you need only buy what's on sale and go to your freezer when meal planning.

Speaking of saving money, I noticed a big chunk of my food budget went to produce. Watching what is abundant at the market and planning your meals accordingly can save you a lot of money. To learn more about produce visit about produce. I believe that the best way to save time and money is to have planned leftovers. You can make them into a completely different meal with just a little planning. Some examples that have worked well for me are the following. Taco's and burrito's the first night, chili the second night and nacho's the third night. Another way to use up the left over taco meat is to make spaghetti sauce with it and then the third night you can make lasagna (this can be frozen if you don't feel like Italian two nights in a row).

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