In our move, I fell out of any menu-creating practice that I had gotten into. We were back to that horrible state of it being 6 or 7pm and none of us having any idea on what to make for dinner. Then that would turn into run to the store for something and quick, easy ingredients to make something at the end of the day.
We’re spending way too much on food and not eating very well (again…sigh!). In order to help us stick to a budget and get the responsibility to land on someone other than me to take care of meal planning, I enlisted Camille to take over. In order to get her to really stick to it, I decided to mix it up a bit.
For the past few weeks, I have been handing our weekly grocery money over to Camille. She has to plan the meals, walk to the store and buy the groceries and cook dinner. For this, she gets to keep a certain portion of the money she has left. I’m still working on those details. Right now it is $30 (or a portion of that if we eat out, etc.).
We have certain expectations – variety of well-balanced meals (not beans and rice or ramen every night, thank you), enough food (she’s still learning to gauge how much is enough) to fill us, using up perishables responsibly, and staple groceries as well as some splurges at the Farmers’ Market.
Is it too much responsibility for a 13 year old? I don’t think so, especially since Camille loves to cook and seems to be learning (and earning) from this experiment. She still usually forgets one thing from the list or gets the wrong thing, but she’s learning to compare prices, quality, etc. She has even begun to learn where everything is in the store … Is it saving us money? Maybe not yet, but we’re still adjusting to this new budget.
What a good idea. Morgan loves to cook but is usually pretty busy in the evenings so doesn’t get to help unless it is a weekend. Last night she made dinner but we had already decided what to have. We all sit down every 2 weeks and plan out a menu, keeping in mind that some nights we are busier than others so we need easier/quicker meals for those nights. Then we add in breakfast & lunch items and there we have our shopping list. We work around what we get from our CSA each week so a lot of side dishes become grilled or roast veggies, mixed salads so that we can incorporate whatever we happen to get that week. We also look for recipes that we can change up (use different cheeses or different veggies) to use our CSA goodies. We’ve really gotten our little system down pretty good and I don’t know what we’d do without it. I hope Camille has good luck with her planning and shopping.
Can I adopt her?
Have room for her in the Blubaru? 🙂