Meat Rationing

Gabe and I are good at a lot of things. Consistently eating leftovers is not one of them.

When we first got married, we didn't have a regular grocery shopping day.

Today, that thought blows my mind. Did we just wait until we had no food in the apartment, and sometimes that happened on a Thursday, sometimes a Monday?

I also remember not planning meals ahead of time, which—again—blows my mind now. I would buy general ingredients, and then decide what to cook on a daily basis. In addition to causing me stress when I had to meal plan every twenty-four hours, this caused us to waste a lot of food. Veggies would wilt before we used them; we'd have too much chicken left over and end up throwing it away.

Now, Tuesday is grocery day and I go to the store knowing what I'm going to cook every night so that we buy only what we need. But those changes have been in effect for years. I want to talk about the latest evolution in money-saving meal planning.

(This isn't even a tip for people—just a step in my Becoming journey—because I'm fairly sure I'm the last person on earth to have this revelation XD)

Only cook the meat you need, and freeze the rest.

For some people, this might not work the best because they will actually eat leftovers or do meal prep. However for us, it has been a game changer.

We rotate through several different proteins: chicken, ground beef, ham, ground turkey, eggs, sausage. I used to cook a whole pound of ground beef if the two of us were having tacos. We would never eat all the meat, and would rarely remember to go back and eat the random serving of taco meat left over. I used to cook the whole half ham thing when we had ham. Same deal.

Lately, I've experimented with just about halving the amount of meat I cook per meal. Somehow—maybe it's a loaves and fishes thing because God knows we're poor again—we feel no less full, and our meat budget goes twice as far.

Doing this, I rarely have to buy more than one or two types of protein a week, and yet we still eat four or five types throughout that week. This change, along with other similar food prep changes (using what we need, freezing the rest), have cut our grocery bill by about 15%.

I know this is a small thing, but it makes me feel strangely empowered when I save us money and keep our lifestyle good. It makes me feel like a Proverbs 31 woman.

And who wouldn't want that?!

~Stephanie