Meal Planning & A Grocery Budget

I don't know about you but for myself meal planning while trying to maintain a grocery budget is not fun at all. I would say I can do pretty well half of the month which works out for us to be about half of each week. The other days it is a lot of leftovers and scraping up what ever you can find. I am having to admit to myself that we make awful choices of what we eat when I do not consistently plan our meals, so...I am going back to something I used a while back and we will be eating well and I will not have to plan it.

You may be wondering what I am talking about...it is E-MEALZ !!! I ran across an article in Southern Living in 2007 about this meal planning service and gave it a try. It was wonderful and I used it for almost a year. I am not sure now why I stopped because it is the best and easiest meal planning service around...well, I am renewing my subscription and I won't be leaving.

Here are the benefits of this service, as I see it:

• it keeps me on budget, because the meals are planned based on weekly sales at the grocery
  
• the recipes are simple
  
• each weeks menu contains a good variety
  
• it is easy to edit the shopping list if decide not to use one of the meals for that week
  
• it is reasonably priced ($1.25 a week)
  

This is how I use the service. I like shopping at Publix so I purchase the family meal plan for Publix. Each week (on Wednesdays for Publix) I just sign in to my account at www.e-mealz.com and print my menu for the week and my grocery list. Next, I check my pantry and refrigerator for anything I may already have on hand. Then I take my shopping list and pull coupons to match the items I will be buying this week. Just that simply I am ready to stock my kitchen for the upcoming week.

If you want to give your meal planning to someone else give E-MEALZ a try. You can check out the website by clicking below. By the way, there are sample menus you can check out on the website. Give it a try, you won't be sorry.