Meal-Planning Challenge: The Week of Cheap Eats

[Amanda]

The Week of Cheap Eats

The Challenge: Design a week-long meal plan (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for seven days) that is:

• Delicious
  
• aka not "peanut butter sandwiches 24/7, et voila!"
• Healthy
• by which I don't mean diet food or low-fats or no-carbs. I mean nutritious, balanced, vitamins, protein, fats, salts - all the food groups working together.
• Cheap
• cost estimates not required but if you want to throw them in there, that would be great.

The Focus: Your wallet. The cheaper the better. How low can you bring your costs down while still serving up a week's worth of delicious, satisfying food?

I thought this could be a good place to practice meal-planning if you want to learn how to do it. Also, perhaps this could be the start of a kind of library for ourselves, with a multitude of handy-dandy hot-to-trot little meal plans lined up & ready to go for when you are feeling lazy but still need to go grocery shopping? 

[Emily]

Ugh.  So I have to plan my meals for next week for real, and I have no inspiration.  My routine is shop after work on Friday, cook on Saturday, so I need to figure out my shopping list tonight.  And I'm blanking.

I will probably do banana blueberry muffins for breakfasts.  They price out to $4.30 for the batch, which lasts me all week.  I could do breakfast for cheaper, but I like my banana blueberry muffins, and I think they're pretty healthy.

For lunch, I've been doing homemade freezer burritos.  I have access to a freezer at work, so I bring in a whole bag of them on Monday, which lasts me for the week. I've basically been making a big thing of beans in the crockpot and then using those with some cheese and some canned peppers. That comes to $7.40 for 8 burritos.  I think I might make picadillo this time, or maybe I'll do black bean and sweet potato burritos.  Either of those would probably be a little more expensive, but I think I can come it at $10 for lunch for the week. 

Snacks: whatever organic apples are on sale. If they've got any organic pears for less than $2 a pound, I'll get some of those, too.  (I don't know why I buy organic apples and pears and not necessarily organic anything else, but I do.  Probably because apples and pears are the only organic produce that's affordable at my grocery store.)  I know that baby carrots are stupid and expensive and wasteful, but I'll probably still buy them, because when I'm really starving I don't want to peel carrots and cut them into carrot sticks. 

I'm stuck on dinners.  I have some frozen chili and lentil soup in the freezer, and I could do those a couple of nights.  But I'm hoping I'm more inspired to come up with dinners tomorrow. 

[Karen Bowness]

my best cheap meal this week was buying a bunch of root veggies (carrots, turnip, parsnip, potato), chopping them up into cubes and roasting them with olive oil and rosemary under some chicken pieces. Bone-in-skin-on is super cheap, and easier than a whole chicken - at 350 for about 50 minutes (or until my digital thermometer told me the chicken was done) and you get at least four servings for about $15, depending on your local prices. if you take the chicken out to rest for a bit so you can de-bone/skin it for serving, put the veggies back in under the broiler for them to get crispy and delicious. 

(you're right to go organic with thin-skinned fruit and veggies, they absorb more of anything that gets applied to them into the flesh - check out this list: http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary/)