Meal Plan and Prepping
Meal Plan and Prepping
Photos by: The Defined Dish and Budgets Bytes
If you are anything like me, you’ve had weeks where grocery store runs didn’t happen until Tuesday night, you relied heavily on Doordash and your calender was so full the last thing you could think through was planning out food, much less putting the grocery list together and getting to the store.
I started meal planning a month at a time a few years ago and what I thought was just a sanity saver is now paying back dividends. Once you set it, you can just press play. Useful in the current season and pull it out the same time next year.
My meal planning went a step further during the pandemic when we started buying a half cow and building our pantry supply. Now instead of just yummy meals, I am factoring in what we have so we are stewarding it all well. A year ago I started my garden and that has been another layer of that. You can read about my Fall Garden here. It’s been more of an internal growth process than anything I’d say, a mindset shift towards sustainability and food freedom. One of provision that God is using in my life for endless lessons I have been so grateful for.
So…I will walk you through how I meal plan, where we source our meat, and provide you with my three month meal plan (obviously starting Mid October) and you can use what is helpful, none of it, or all of it. Maybe it’s just that sanity saver those weeks you just cant think straight or maybe it’s every week. Whatever works for you, I’m happy to provide some help.
Alrighty, so we get a half cow from a friend of mine’s dad who has a ranch. Weston A. Price has a great index you can use to find a local farm to you as I know not everyone reading this is local to me. I know 1915 Farm is another one a lot of people order from and they love it! If you are wanting bulk, I would check Weston A Price’s site. They have so many other good resources as well! We get the whole chicken box from Good Ranchers on a 4 week subscription. This has chicken breasts, thighs, drumsticks and quarters in it and I will say, the quality is consistent and always so good. We get a whole chickens, bacon, Italian sausage, chorizo and chicken bones for homemade broth from Yonder Way Farm every two weeks. Both Yonder Way and Good Ranchers have beef, we just don’t need that since we get a half cow once a year but it’s available for those of you that do need it and want to move away from the grocery store.
So this meal plan, I took inventory of the different cuts we have and assigned them to different days, knowing we have the most of ground beef and spreading out the others so we don’t run out before it’s time to order another half cow. Once I had the meat assigned to days, it was fairly easy to add in our favorite recipes, and go through our favorite cookbooks to fill in the gaps.
The cookbooks referenced are The Defined Dish we have already cooked from a tone and everyone loves everything we’ve made from there, Half Baked Harvest and The Comfortable Kitchen. There are a few recipes from Chris Sheppard’s Cooking Like a Local cookbook for the most part, they are all from the first three with reference to the page numbers. One of the things I love about these cookbook is they use a lot of white flour alternatives that are healthier for you as well as good cooking oils. For us, we are dairy and gluten free so we substitute coconut milk and some other things a lot that are already part of The Defined Dish’s recipes. I also love these books because a lot of the ingredients overlap so it’s easy to buy in bulk from Costco to save money.
I feel like having a full disclosure “cost” is also important so here a little breakdown:
Good Ranchers chicken box is $139.00 and we do every 4 weeks
Yonder Way order is $90.00 bi/weekly
Half Cow was $1900.00 for about 320lbs of beef = about $5.80/lb
Our monthly grocery budget is $1800.00 all meals at home. After the above it leaves between $270-300 per week which is more than enough.
So Costco…here is a list of items I keep stocked from there for easy meals I can make in the event of a Hurrican, power outage etc. as well as staples to fold into a lot of the recipes from the books above.
Basmati Rice
unbleached flour for homemade sourdough (I know there is a lot of controversy of flour, and I’ll take the win of making our own bread for now, and worry about finding a better flour later)
red beans
coconut milk
marinara
peanut butter
jams
beef jerky
dried fruit bars (we love That’s All)
nuts
olive oil
Kerrygold butter and cheddar blocks
protein powder
hard boiled eggs
chicken nuggets
Other staples from the grocery I make sure I keep on hand, are lasagna egg noodles and spinach fettuccini. I guess my long term goal is to not be dependent at all on grocery stores, we still have a ways to go before that’s a reality. But small steps…if this feels overwhelming, start small. Maybe you build a 3 day emergency food supply in case of a storm or outage. Then maybe you extend that to 7 days. Then once you have that you can extend it a 10 day. Or maybe starting small for you is getting on a meat subscription so you know you are getting quality meat that’s price competitively with the grocery stores. Or maybe starting small is eating out less and cooking more in which case I hope this meal plan serves you so well. Where ever you start is ok!
The form below will get you a download of the meal plan as well as calendars with the meat assigned by day. I am always an email or DM away and am happy to help - just reach out. And if this has been helpful, will you share it with two friends? I’d love to share the information with as many as possible.
xoxo,
lauren