Breakfast, lunch, and my grocery budget
One of the most common questions I get has to do with my breakfast and lunch plans. Since I only post my dinner plans, readers often wonder if I'm including breakfast and lunch expenses in my budget and they ask what we eat for those meals. I've responded to this question pretty often in the comments, but not everyone reads the comments and so the question keeps getting asked(which doesn't really bother me...I love comments and emails, so keep 'em coming!). However, I thought it would make my life easier if I wrote a post about this, and then when someone asks, I can just link them to this post. I'll also probably link to this post each week when I post my menu.
First, my grocery budget is all inclusive. The $80-$100 a week covers ALL the food that the six of us eat(breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and beverages), and also our toiletries, paper products, and cleaning supplies. We hardly ever eat out(although my husband occasionally goes to lunch with co-workers), so I'm usually grocery shopping for 7 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.
As for the second part of the question, I don't generally plan our breakfast and lunches because they're pretty predictable and also because I tend to decide at least some of them on the spur of the moment(for instance, at lunch I often scan the fridge for leftovers, and I can't plan that sort of thing).
Breakfast is usually cold cereal for my husband. He eats before everyone else because he has to leave early for work, so I don't really have time to cook anything for him. The kids and I also eat cold cereal(purchased on sale with coupons), but we also eat bagels(Panera donates day-old bread to my church), muffins, and hot cereals. Everyone but me usually drinks a small glass of orange juice with whatever we're eating. And depending on the time of year, we have fruit at breakfast(this is more common in the summertime when I have melons and strawberries around more often).
Lunch for my husband is almost always leftovers. I'm so blessed to have a husband who happily eats leftovers...leftovers are about the cheapest lunch available, and eating them is a great way to avoid wasting food.
I don't love to eat leftovers at lunch, but I do if it's necessary. Depending on the type of leftover, the kids will sometimes eat leftovers at lunch as well. A normal lunch for them, though, consists of fruit and yogurt smoothies(made from homemade yogurt, frozen fruit, bananas, and sometimes spinach), and bread(usually leftover from the night before), topped with whatever they want(peanut butter, jam, honey, etc). If we eat yogurt in a bowl instead of in a smoothie, we will sometimes have fruit with lunch(the smoothies have fruit in them, so I don't really feel it's necessary to serve fruit in addition to those).
Oh, and at lunch the kids and I drink either yogurt smoothies or water, and in my husband's lunch I usually pack a bottle of iced tea(which, of course, is poured from a gallon container in a single-serve Snapple bottle which we use over and over again. Individual bottles of iced tea are ridiculously expensive.).
So, that's our very unexciting lunch and breakfast routine. Hopefully our breakfasts will get a little more interesting as I work on reducing our dependence on breakfast cereal. And who knows...I might find that I need to plan breakfast meals once I start to cook them more, so it's possible that they will start showing up on my menu plans. For now, though, I'm likely going to stick with just planning my dinner meals. That's just what works for me, though...iIf you find that it works better to plan your breakfasts and lunches along with your dinners, go for it.
OK...I am really impressed that your grocery budget includes all your household essentials as well as food. I did not know that! I have a lot of improvement to make!
Tips for saving $ on cleaning/toiletry items would be great!
I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, because I am REALLY wondering..
Do you get bored eating the same things for breakfast and lunch?
As my kiddos grew older we noticed that ceral did not stick to their ribs for very long. We started making pancake batter to keep in the fridge, premade waffles to toast whenever and anything with toast.
One of our favs for breakfast remains steadfast-Dutch baby. An oven pancake that poofs like a soufle, then deflates and goes flat when taken out of the oven. Topped with fruit or syrup it still wins hands down. ( For each person eating, mix together 1 egg,1/4 cup milk,1/4cupflour. Place 2 tbsp butter in an oven proof pan, at 350. When butter is melted, pour mix into pan and bake 20-25 minutes. til really poofed and light brown.*4people =4 eggs,1 cup milk, 1 cup flour-and I use a cast iron skillet for cooking in.* Cut in equal portions and serve with powder sugar, fruit and yogurt, or syrup.
You are doing a great job with your plans! I have been doing this almost 20 years and have not seen anyone so determined as you to change their ways. KUDOS!
A bit of a side note - do you play the Grocery Game? I'm looking to save more on groceries and was wondering if you had tried it.
I usually don't eat breakfast food for breakfast- I love making a big batch of veggie stew or dahl (lentil soup) and just reheating a bowl of it in the morning. It puts me ahead on my veggies for the day, generally has more/equal fiber than in most cereals, and has way less sugar and empty processed carbs than a lot of breakfast foods. Add a slice of toasted homemade wheat bread and I'm in heaven 😉
I'm right on board with your lunches! Simple, nutritious, easy to make 🙂
A favorite breakfast recipe is Banana Syrup. Slice an over-ripe banana (the mushier the better!) into a microwave bowl. Add about a Tb. of butter and about a Tb. of brown sugar, cover, and microwave for a minute or two, until it's nice and syrupy. Serve over pancakes. This avoids the sweeteners and colorings in commercial syrup AND uses up old bananas!
Maddie, posts on that are in the offing. 😉
FG, no, I don't really get bored, probably due to two things. First, I grew up eating breakfast and lunch this way, so I'm used to it. Secondly, there is quite a lot of room for variation in our breakfast and lunch meals. There are endless varieties of cereal, bagels and muffins, you know? And then at lunchtime, we eat different types of fruit, and lots of different kinds of bread(it's usually leftover bread from the night before and I make lots of different breads with our dinners). So, it's not like we eat EXACTLY the same thing each day.
Then too, trying to come up with a new and interesting cooked meal three times a day would be exhausting to me. I prefer to keep things simple for two of our meals, and then I have more energy to make interesting dinners.
Wendy-I make something like that. Unfortunately, my kids aren't big fans, which bums me out.
Adrienne, I haven't done that. I hate to pay to save money, and then too, I don't buy much in the way of prepared foods, which is what a lot of coupons are for. I have more to say about that, so I'll probably post about that in the future.
I definitely agree with you.
I just have a hard time with H. We are at work at 5am Mon-Fri, and the easiest thing to make at work is instant oatmeal. But he gets bored of it. So I try yogurt and fruit, and that too he gets bored of! It's so frustrating trying to find a variety of foods that he enjoys.
I swear he's worse than a child! lol. 😉
lol! My husband is the same way with lunch(although he does happily eat cereal for breakfast every day). The lunch thing isn't a big deal during the week, because there's a nice variety of leftovers, but on the weekends he gets bored with the options. It does get kind of annoying, especially because the other five of us are fine with having not-so-exciting lunches. :p
I agree with you, Kirsten, most
coupons are for processed foods, which I don't buy either. The exception is to have something like a Stouffers frozen lasagne in the freezer for days when I'm super busy or not up to par for cooking dinner.I also double recipes hand have a few homemade meals
in the freezer for the same purpose.
I have notice you serve lots of fruit but not all that many veggies. I make sure we have both fruit and vegetables eacd day.
Congratulations on your six month anniversary of your blog.
I love reading your posts every day and have learned new ways to save.
Yeah, we probably could stand to eat more veggies. I've been trying to work on that. We have been adding baby spinach to our yogurt smoothies, we've been eating spinach salads(yay for cheap spinach at Aldi's!), and we do eat a fair number of regular green salads too. We eat steamed broccoli too, when it's on sale for $.99 a pound.
We eat a LOT more veggies in the summertime when they're cheap and so much tastier. We eat tomatoes then like they're going out of style! lol
I've been weary of spinach smoothies ever since I read of a mother whose 2 year old died after she gave him a spinach smoothie. She didn't wash the spinach quite well enough and there was some terrible bacteria in it that it got through the soil or something. But maybe my main concern would just be that it's GREEN!
My youngest will not eat cereal so I make panckase or french bread and freeze. It is cheaper than cereal for the most part.
Hi Kirsten, We usually have cereal for breakfast - being OLD I have All Bran and wheaties and some of the cereal mix that my wife makes. This mix consists of all kinds of chopped nuts, chopped dried fruits, oat flakes and a whole bunch of "good stuff". On to that we put Yogurt (From the big quart size cups 'coz it's cheaper that way.) Sometimes we have bagels with cream cheese - bagels from Costco, they are quite reasonable, we get the whole wheat kind with raisins in. We also make a smoothy with whatever we have, maybe a banana and an orange - we use a Vita Mix which is a sort of high powered liquidizer, I can put in a whole apple and it liquidizes the whole thing - skin, seeds, the lot, there is not a sign of any skin or anything it is all pure liquid (You have to put in some water or it is too thick to drink) During the summer our smoothy contains whatever I find in the garden - I might add a few strawberries, especially the ones that are not 'perfect' or some raspberries, or we might have a vegetable smoothy with vegetables from the garden. It is also a great way to use up those less than appetizing looking veg that may be a bit 'past it' ,cut out the bad bits and liquidize the rest. A lot of tomato juice this way in the summer.
Hi Kristen,
Just stumbled on your blog and am totally inspired to start baking! I just wanted to make a suggestion for breakfast that we have started to do around here. When I make pancakes or waffles, I double or triple the batch. I then cook them and immediately put the extras on a cookie sheet in the freezer. After a short time, I remove them from the cookie sheet and put them in a ziplock bag. We then have "frozen waffles" or "pancakes" on hand for mornings. We simply pop them in the toaster and they taste just as good as fresh ones, are much cheaper than buy "Eggos", and they save me from having to clean the waffle maker constantly ( a dreaded chore)!