Are you joining me for the Eat at Home Challenge! I’m thrilled to have SO many of you participating this time around!
For those who are wondering how the challenge will work, here are the details:
- I’ll be on Facebook Live every weekday morning this week around 9 a.m. prepping our dinner for that evening. If you want to join us live, I’d love to have you do so!
- Every day at 2 p.m., I’ll send out an email with the video for that day’s recipe, the recipe I made, plus some menu-planning tips and money-saving suggestions. There will be a lot of things that I’ll only be sharing in the email (I won’t be posting them here), so if you don’t want to miss out, be sure to sign up to get my emails here.
- You can also interact on the Facebook Group every day and share what you are making for dinner, if you’d like!
- I’ll be using the Eat at Home Menu Plans for this week’s menu plan. I love these menu plans because you get 4 different meal plans in two different sizes and you get a color-coded grocery list. Plus, they are on sale for as low as $1.13 per week. (I’ll share more details in the coming days!)
I shared my menu plan for this week and the grocery list in the email I sent out to the Eat at Home email list. (Not on that list? Sign up here.)
We went to Aldi and bought everything we needed for these recipes. We also picked up some other items we needed (milk, juice, half & half, blueberries for $1.29, apples for $1.49, and frozen veggies).
We already have quite a few staple items on hand (cereal, lunch stuff, snack stuff, etc.) and I already have some ground beef on hand that I’m going to use for the meatballs instead of buying pre-made meatballs.
Our total for all these groceries was $75.01 — and that (combined with what we already have on hand) should cover all of our breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks this week.
A Few Important Notes:
If you follow here on MoneySavingMom.com, you know that I typically buy what’s on sale, what’s marked down, and what I can get on a really great deal with coupons. So we typically have a lot groceries on hand and that’s what I usually plan our menus based upon.
But for this week, since I know most of you probably don’t have a big stockpile of items and you might also not have time to be using coupons or hunting down the best deals and markdowns multiple times per week, I wanted to show you a more realistic look at how you can buy your groceries and not spend a huge amount of money at the store.
If we were to have bought a few boxes of cereal for breakfasts, eggs, some lunchmeat, some bread, maybe a few items for snacks, and a few other necessities, we still could have bought everything needed for all of our meals and spent $125 or less.
You might have different stores and different prices, but planning a menu based upon fairly inexpensive ingredients, spending a little time in the kitchen everyday, and basing your snacks and sides upon what’s on sale (we just bought the fruit that was on sale and will eat a lot of apples and blueberries this week!), you can keep it simple and keep your grocery budget low!
What I Made Today
Today’s recipe was All Day Beef Stew. I made it in the crockpot and set it on low and used the timer feature to set the timer for 7 hours. Kathrynne has a basketball game tonight so we probably won’t be home until 7:30 p.m.
When the timer goes off on the crockpot, it will just stay on warm and will be ready for us when we walk in the door! We’re going to serve it with crackers and cheese that I already had on hand and some sliced apples.
You can watch me make the recipe live below:
And here’s what the final product looked like before I cooked it:
I’ll let you know tomorrow what we thought of the recipe! I think it’s going to be yummy — and it was so simple to make!
Thanks for joining me in this challenge. If you want to share what you cooked today, head over here to the Facebook Group and leave a comment and tell us!
Looking for some inspiration to eat at home more often?
I’m using the Eat at Home menu-planning service for my recipes for this challenge. I love this menu-planning service and highly recommend it — especially if you struggle to come up with the time and inspiration to make your own menus.
Eat at Home is a menu-planning service designed to make getting dinner on the table much easier every night. It was a service created by Tiffany, a mom of 4 who loves to cook and loves to gather her family around the table, but has found that if she doesn't have a quick and easy plan, it's hard to make that happen.
How Does the Eat at Home Menu-Planning Service Work?
The Eat at Home menu-planning service is an incredible way to help you save time and save money. You don't have to worry about planning menus OR grocery list, because Tiffany does all of that for you as part of the menu-planning service.
She has designed it specifically with busy families in mind and the menu plans offer:
The recipes can all be fixed quickly, with only a few minutes of hands-on prep. Because the recipes use common pantry ingredients, it's likely that you have everything you need to make many of the recipes.
It's so convenient because all the work is done for you! You just choose which menu plan you'll use, print the grocery list, go shopping, and then spend a few minutes prepping food each day and dinner is D-O-N-E!
When you sign up for the plan (it's just a few dollars per week — or less!), each month, you'll get:
- An entire money of No Flour, No Sugar menu plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions
- An entire month of Traditional Menu Plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions
- An entire month of Slow Cooker Menu Plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions (this is my favorite!)
- An entire month of Whole Food Menu Plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions
- Each menu plan comes with recipes created for small family (3-4 servings) and large family (6-8 servings)
- Color-coded grocery lists make it easy to swap out ingredients or whole meals
- Printable Menus to hang on the fridge or near your calendar, so you can easily see what's for dinner that week and your family can too
- Access to the entire month at once!
- 1 Hour Freezer Stash Plans – a new plan each month to stock your freezer with 6 meals in 1 hour!
You can choose to stick with just the traditional menu plan or just the slow cooker menu plan or just the whole foods menu plan or just the no flour, no sugar menu plan. Or, you can rotate different menu plans on different weeks, depending upon what you feel like cooking or how much time you have!
Get the Eat at Home Menu-Planning Service for as Low as $1.13 per Week!
If you struggle to make menu plans and would love for someone to make them for you + make a grocery list for you, it's well worth spending a few dollars every week to let Eat at Home do the work for you.
This week only, when you sign up for their plan (either the monthly plan, the quarterly plan, or the yearly plan, you can get 30% off through January 14, 2019 by using coupon code NEW at checkout!)
That makes the done-for-you menu plans and grocery lists as low as $1.13 per week. And you get access to all four plans and the freezer cooking plans for the whole month at the rate!
(Oh and they have a fantastic two-week money-back guarantee if you think you want to try it out but aren't sure whether it will work for you or not!)
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