Thrifty Couple Weekly Menu Week of 4/5!

Last week we ended up saving even more on our dinner menu as the nearly 5 lbs. of London Broil lasted us for 3 meals, plus an extra meal for the freezer! I couldn’t believe how much beef we had! PLUS, Friday night we ended up going to IHOP restaraunt as we didn’t have a family dinner out scheduled, and hadn’t necessarily planned on it. But, I ran to Kohls to get Easter dresses (got 3 adorable Easter dresses for our 3 girls for $25 total!!! Each dress was $36 normally – but we got all 3 for less than the cost of 1! Wahoo!) and a couple of other errands for our Thrifty Easter celebration and egg hunts on Saturday.  So, for convenience, we ended up going out! Best news is that kids eat FREE all month long at IHOP for the month of April!!

Also, we had an Easter Celebration with extended family on Saturday.  We didn’t have to provide or make anything (nice blessing) as we provided the turkey for the meal! We had a coupon for a FREE turkey that we received around the Christmas holiday.  It has been hanging on our fridge and I told Thrifty Al we had no room in our freezers and so we would literally have to get it and cook it immediately! Well, we just passed this voucher along to my mom and she picked up a FREE turkey for the meal! After the meal was over, there was still tons of turkey left, we brought home some and used half of it for Monday’s meal and will use the other half in a future menu!

Here’s the Thrifty Menu for this week!!

As a recap of how our menu works:

1. We don’t necessarily have a day-by-day plan for our lunches and breakfasts or snacks, just our dinners.  We have a list of ideas for those meals that week, and so we wake up eating selections from the list. For lunches, we also have a list of possible lunch ideas for that week, but most lunches end up being leftovers, which is why we have a loose plan!
2. Although we have stayed within our $240 per month budget (covers groceries, toiletries, household, and diapers), we haven’t necessarily tracked how much each meal costs us and thought it would be fun to figure it out and share it with you as well.  We will be laying out the cost of our dinners!
3. Desserts are planned last minute as well! We usually crack open a box of cookies, however, we lay out ideas and then sometimes make something special!
4. Our Sunday dinner plans are varied, we try to have guests from church over every other week, if we know in advance, we usually put a roast in the crockpot, or prepare a casserole. If it is planned last minute (as many are) we have homemade chilis and stews in the freezer to heat up, frozen entrees and sides to heat up,  or lots of pastas to quickly feed a crowd! Thank goodness for a full pantry! Anyway, if it is just us, we usually have leftovers, lunch or snack items, or simple prepared meals! So on our menu, you will find Sunday’s marked with a “?”
5. Our goal for this site is to share the deals, freebies, hot finds; but we also want to share how we live as a larger family on a tight budget everyday and ways that we try to live thriftily in every area of life….. so this would be one of them!

Here are the ideas for breakfasts this week:

• Fruit Smoothies
• Toast and Scrambled Eggs
• English Muffin with Ham, Cheese, and Egg
• Breakfast Cake and fruit

Here are the ideas for lunches this week:

• Leftovers
• Pita Pocket sandwiches
• Burritos
• Cheese Sandwiches and tomato soup

Here are the snack ideas for this week:

• Crackers and cream cheese
• Strawberries and yogurt
• Bananas
• Goldfish crackers

Here are the dessert ideas this week:

• Ice Cream Bars
• Jello Salad
• Chocolate Chip Cookies

Dinner Menu:

• Monday: Turkey Pot Pie and Deviled Eggs
• Tuesday: Pot Luck dinner at Church. Taking some of our freezer meals.
• Wednesday: Beef Stroganoff, Steamed Veggies, oranges, salad
• Thursday: Sweet and Sour chicken with rice, salad, Jello- salad
• Friday: Sloppy Joe Pot Pie with ground Turkey, salad, steamed veggies
• Saturday: Dinner Out
• Sunday: Low key sandwich, soups or leftovers!

Monday: Turkey Pot Pie and Deviled Eggs ( I will share recipes for both of these!)

• 4 cups chopped turkey FREE
• 2 cans cream of chicken soup .78
• 1 can chicken broth .20
• Fresh veggies for pot pie about .90 worth
• 3 cups of Bisquick about .20 worth
• 9 Eggs .65
• ingredients to make the “deviled” part of the eggs – maybe .10?

Total Cost: $2.83 for the whole meal for 6 = about .47 per serving! We had this tonight, it was really good and we had half of it left for lunch tomorrow!

Tuesday: Pot Luck dinner at Church. Taking some of our freezer meals

Wednesday: Beef Stroganoff, Steamed Veggies, oranges

• Canned beef from cannery (I honestly cannot remember, we got it sooo long ago!) ?
• Egg Noodles .25
• Sour Cream for sauce .50
• Fresh Steamed Veggies $1.25
• Salad and dressings about $1.00
• Oranges about .66 worth

Total Cost: $3.66 for the whole meal for 6 = about .61 per serving!

Thursday: Sweet and Sour chicken with rice, salad, Jello- salad

• Chicken for Stir-Fry $2.00
• Vegetables and sauce for Stir fry $1.90
• Rice about .30 worth
• Salad and dressings about $1.00
• Jello .25
• Strawberries for Jello salad .50

Total Cost: $5.95 for the whole meal for 6 = about .99 per serving!

Friday: Sloppy Joe Pot Pie with ground Turkey, steamed veggies and green salad

• 1 lb. ground turkey – $2.29
• 1 can Manwich .50
• 1 onion .20
• 1 package of shredded cheese (we used a mexican blend) .90
• 1 cup Bisquick mix .07 worth
• 1/2 cup milk about .10 worth
• 1 egg .17
• Fresh Steamed Veggies $1.25
• Salad and dressings about $1.00

Total Cost: $6.58 for the whole meal for 6 = $1.10 per serving!

Saturday: Family Dinner Out!

Sunday: Low key sandwich, soups or leftovers! Cheap!

COST SUMMARY FOR THIS WEEK’S DINNERS: Cost for the dinners this week $19.02 for the 6 of us!

ACK! I accidentally edited last week’s menu instead of making a new post and lost the old content!!! So the week of 3/29 menu is gone – it was a fun one too as it had Thrifty Al’s birthday menu! Oh well!! So if you see a week gap – this is why- ugh!