July Meal Plan! :)

I am so excited that I am feeling good enough to cook and meal plan for our family this month. The past two months of feeling yucky and not up to cooking and meal planning definitely took a toll on our grocery budget! I can say now that I am positive that monthly meal planning has helped us stay within our $300 grocery budget.

So, I thought I would share our meal plan for July! :) We have Merge (pre-married class at Watermark) on Tuesday nights through July 17th and we are headed to England for 8 days at the end of July, plus date nights sprinkled in, so I only needed to come up with 10 meals for July (remember, we eat left overs at least twice a week!). I also decided to try four new Pinterest inspired dinners this month! I love trying new recipes, I'll write a review of each of them throughout the month.

Our meals: (l/o= left overs) (P=pinterest recipe with a link!) (MYO=make your own)
Spinach and chicken stuffed shells (l/o)
Hamburgers for a 4th of July cookout where we had to BYO meat
Southwest Chopped Chicken Salad (l/o) (P)
Caprese Pasta (l/o) (P)
MYO quesadillas with black beans and cilantro lime rice
Hamburgers, baked beans and sweet potato fries
Creamy Avocado Pasta (l/o) (P)
Spaghetti and Meatballs (l/o)
Breakfast for dinner- pancakes and eggs probably
Balsalmic chicken and tortellini salad (l/o) (P)

So, with 10 meals (6 with left overs) that's 16 meals, plus three dinners at church and two/three date nights (1 family date night and two mommy/daddy date nights) we have 22 dinners for July! The other 8 will be in England... bring on the curry and pub food!!

For breakfast we usually just eat cereal/oatmeal and fruit or eggs.

Lunches in our house are PB&J, mac and cheese, fruit (blueberries, oranges, strawberries, apples, grapes, watermelon), fresh veggies (carrotts & bell peppers mainly!), yogurt, grilled cheese or left overs!

Snacks are fruit/veggies, peanut butter and apples, crackers or gold fish.

We really only drink water or milk in our house. We're not big juice or soda drinkers! That helps the grocery budget a lot!

Happy eating! :)

Love,
The Vogs