Fam Faves- Meals

Are you a meal planner? Or a fly by the seat of you pants kinda person??

I hope it won’t surprise you that I am definitely a meal planner! Just about every week, I take some time on the weekend to look over our up coming events and write down my meals for the week. This helps me to make a grocery list and save money by eating at home and having all the ingredients we need. I also plan for using leftovers this way to help us reduce food waste.

One of my most favorite things is my Simple Purposeful Living 52-week meal planner! This is such a handy tool that gives me space to write out my meals and grocery list all in one place. Then the grocery list tears out for me to take to the store! Being that the meal plan is spiral bound it helps when I’m having “food-block” and need some ideas. I can just flip back through and refresh my memory on some of my family favorites. I highly encourage you to grab this notebook for your family asap!

Do you need ideas NOW?! Here are some of my family’s favorite meals that are quick and easy and fairly cheap too!

Breakfast! We do breakfast for supper at least once a week. But we still mix that up. Breakfast food are some of the cheapest, they can be made in a very healthy manner and the kids always love it. I like to keep easy breakfast foods on hand if I need to throw a meal together quickly. It also is a great meal to make for guest. Again, everyone loves breakfast! I like to keep hash brown patties and sausage patties in the freezer. I am TERRIBLE at cooking hash brown, I mess them up every time, so that patties saves me this work. The sausage patties are great for making egg sandwiches with. One of our favorite recipes for breakfast is Swedish Pancakes. These are baked in the oven (so you aren’t standing over the stove) and are so delish. And they are easy enough to make that this is my husband’s go-to meal when it’s his turn to cook. Hehe.

Another favorite in our house is homemade pizza. A trick we learned this summer that we do on a very regular basis is grilling pizzas. During the summer months I would stock up on the very cheap frozen pizzas. My mom found me a pizza stone at a garage sale for $0.50 and we use that right on our grill!! Make sure to start the grill, stone and cold pizza all at the same time. If you put a cold pizza on a hot stone, you could crack the stone. Frozen pizzas were a staple for our deck parties, family gatherings and just that night no one wanted to be in the kitchen. They might not be the most amazing dish you’ve ever eaten, but it got the job done and allowed us all more time for fun. We do make REAL homemade pizzas too! I like to use crescent rolls as crust then pile on some toppings. We go traditional, and non-traditional with two favorites being pesto-chicken and taco pizza. For taco pizza use half regular pizza sauce and half refried beans as your sauce! Pizza perfection!

It doesn’t have to be hard, fancy or time consuming! Happy Planning!

Happy Harvesting,
Leah