This is a new blog all about cheap menu planning, with each menu plan for 8 days. My name is Julie Nield and I am a Canadian living in the US in central Ohio. I am a stay-at-home mom and enjoy reading about cheap cooking online.
The purpose of this blog is to educate blog readers in cheap menu planning tips and I will be showing quite a few examples of 8 day menu plans for one over the next 3 weeks.
My average daily cost for 3 meals a day and one snack, including modest caffeine a day and cookies is $3.60 a day. The average weekly cost of my standard menu plans for 7 days is $25.20 a week and the average monthly cost of my menu plans in October 2018 is $108.00 a month.
I get my prices from Meijer.com and Walmart. If you shop at Aldi, DollarTree and DollarGeneral you should be able to lower the menu costs by 12 percent, or to $3.17 a day or $95 dollars a month. All you need to do to cook for one for 30 days for $95.00 is follow my priced 8 day menu plans and do most of the shopping at Aldi, DollarTree and DollarGeneral, or stock up on sales each week at a regular grocery store, aiming to save 12 percent on average on all the food.
As a check on the thriftiness of my standard menu plans, the USDA thrifty weekly menu plan for a 50 year old is $36.70 a week. My standard menu plans are 68.66 percent of the USDA standard weekly thrifty menu plan for one over the age of 50 years old. That is very thrifty!!!
I get my costs down in my menu plans by only pricing the quantities that are used, rather than the quantities that are bought each week. Only the food that is planned to eat is costed out. Generally each week your weekly totals will go over the costs for the week, but you will have food left over to start on next week.
I generally do my 8 day menu plans with a half cookie recipe for snacks costing about $4, a standard breakfast of oatmeal with sugar, and a standard lunch with a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread with an assortment of part fruits and a carrot on the side. At lunch you can eat one cookie from the cookie recipe on the side.
Dinners on my standard 8 day menu plans are generally making a big, huge one recipe cooking spree for all 8 days. If the big recipe only makes enough for 7 days, a tuna salad and English muffin is what is served for the 8th day. Cooking only one thing for dinner for the 8 days and freezing the leftover saves a great deal of money on leftover ingredients and saves time in cooking only once to twice for dinner every 8 days. On the following day, do the tidying up of the kitchen after you cooked the previous day.
If you like the blog posts and menu plans on this new blog, feel free to comment in the user comments at the end of the blog post. I will be writing up new blog posts about requested topics from blog readers online.
My first blog post is about how to do a weekly 8 day menu plan for just $25.02 for 8 days, which is the approximate amount of inflation on blog posts about cooking for one week for $20.00 to $21.00 3 years ago. Now that prices have risen, it costs just a shade more to cook as if you were cooking for a week for just $20 to $21 three years ago. Remember, if you shop for your menu plan at Aldi, it will be as if prices hadn't risen for the last 3 years at all. You will save 33 percent off your food on average. Remember you need a quarter for the cart rental at Aldi and your bags will cost you money each. Bring your own reusable environmental bags to Aldi and load them when you unload your groceries into the trunk.
If you cook from my 8 day menu plans and shop at Aldi, DollarTree and DollarGeneral or stock up on sales at the regular supermarket in order to save approximately 12 percent off my Meijer priced groceries in October 2018, you can cook for one for 30 days for about $95.00. You should be able to save 35 percent by adopting my new thrifty 8 day menu plans.
Remember, for each 8 day menu plan I put the shopping list first and describe the menu second. The shopping list includes Meijer regular prices at the date the 8 day menu plan is composed. I put my name and the date of the blog post at the end of each blog post. Good luck to you and happy reading!
Julie Nield October 19, 2018
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