So Sunday afternoon I look at the clock and realize I have 20 minutes to get a grocery list put together before my hubby goes into town to get the kids to all of the church functions for the evening.  You have to understand…we live in the country and I am one of ‘those’ people that insists we are efficient with our time spent in town! I can’t stand the idea of the car going to town to drop off kids and then going back to town later or another day to do the shopping (it’s a personal growth issue…I know…but my husband has learned to love it after 20 years!)

 So….what am I going to do?  Twenty minutes to get the list together for a full week of meals that have not been planned yet?  I do not panic but defer to the printed grocery list we work from every single week.  We print this in our HG cookbooks and my family uses it religiously.  But today I look at my 2 boxes of casserole kits that had just been delivered and remembered that the grocery list was included.  I tear open the boxes and fill my grocery list with the items listed on both flyers.  I then take my ‘preprinted…fill in the amount’ grocery list to the pantry and go down the list looking for standard canned and dry goods that we need to keep on our shelf and fill in the blanks.  Then it’s off to the fridge/freezer.  I stand with the door open, list in hand, and do a quick inventory of what is missing or almost gone and fill in the amounts of items needed preprinted on the list.  Grocery list completed with food for a week of 3 meals a day plus snacks! And did I mention that I went ahead and used the tip from the list in the casserole kits to buy enough grocery items to make 2-3 of each casserole so I can cook ahead in the next few weeks?

 At this point the sweet daughter of the family is honking the horn to signal us that she is going to be late to praise rehearsals!  I hand off the list to my dear hubby and am confident that it will all come back to me just as listed.  Now I can turn my attention to listing the meals we will be able to choose from for the week.  I keep a running list on a chalkboard in the kitchen so any member of the family can pick a meal and make it during the week. 

Several hours later…family returns with groceries in hand.  I am ready to face a week with the answer to ‘what’s for dinner?’!  By the way…as I was looking at the reciept from the grocery excursion…I was intrigued by the amount.  I think I am feeding my family dinner for less than $2 a serving.  I will dig in and let you know what I find out! 

 How do you get dinner on the table every week? 

 God Bless!

Tami

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Planning Your Meals, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.