A menu on a Monday (plus what I’ve spent on groceries this year)

I’ve been such a slacker with these monthly menu plans.   Part of the problem is that in the winter, I am really, really unmotivated to take pictures of our meals because the light is so terrible.

However!

Despite the fact that there are 8 inches of snow on my deck this morning, spring is indeed coming and days are getting longer, and so I will be getting more camera-happy at mealtimes.

Which means menu plans should be a little more consistent around these here parts.

I do plan my menus ahead of time, but so that I can share pictures, I share a week’s worth of meals after we’ve eaten them.

I made a butterflied, salted, roasted chicken, which we ate with mashed potatoes, gravy, and a green salad.

Then we had a meal of old standbys…strawberry green salad and sloppy joes on homemade hamburger buns.

Next up: Grilled steaks, sweet potatoes, and green beans

I’m not one to buy steaks, but when you buy 1/4 of a local cow, then you get some fancier cuts along with your ground beef.

Then I had some prosciutto from Aldi that needed to be used up, so I made prosciutto-wrapped chicken breasts, which is a recipe from my six-ingredient cookbook.

I cannot for the life of me remember what we had with this.

Leftover steak became steak quesadillas, which we ate with guacamole, salsa, and some fruit.

Here’s how I make bacon quesadillas, but for the steak version, I filled the tortillas with sliced steak, a bit of salsa, some green onions, and cheese.

I made a couple of homemade pizzas, and we drank root beer.

(Root beer with pizza is the occasional exception to our (tap) water-drinking lifestyle.   Ok, that and breakfast tea.)

And we topped off the week with a date night.

I took some very detailed pictures of a grocery shopping trip in February, but then never posted them, so here you go.

(The first picture is includes clearance candy I bought after Valentine’s Day and also some sweetened beverages that we bought for one of the girls’ birthday meals.   It’s kind of a tradition around here to buy juice boxes on birthdays.   My girls think these are a super awesome treat, due to the afore-mentioned water-as-beverage lifestyle around here. 😉 )

I don’t have specific grocery totals for this particular shopping trip, but as of the end of February, I’d spent about $1300 on groceries, which is about $166 a week.

That’s a bit artificially low, though, because I paid for the beef last year, and we’ve obviously been eating that this year.   But still, I’m pretty happy with my average, given that I’ve been buying a few more organic things, my kids are eating more (The teenager and the almost-teenager are definitely hungrier than they used to be!), and I’ve been sticking nearly 100% to local, organic chicken.

Ok.

I promise I won’t skip a month between menu plans next time.   😉