I talked a little bit on Monday about the changes/ goals I have for the next school year. My goal is to use up  the food that we have both in the freezers and pantry. At the same time, I want to reduce the amount of money we are spending on food as well. My goal in that area is to spend less than $475 a month on groceries. I would also like to put at least $300 a month toward meat purchases next summer.  The final piece of that is that we have to have meals that are easier to fix on some days just because of your busy lives.

After watching a video on You Tube, I decided to start a meal rotation to make menu planning a little bit easier for me. I tried to make a good list of all the items we have to use for meals. Looking at this list I am estimating that I have at least 100 full meals that can be made with the items we already have on hand.  This should be at least 3 full month of meals. So in December, I may need to purchase some additional meats for the remainder of the school year. At that point it should be very easy to purchase what we need as we continue to use up the food we already have on hand. The hard part of this challenge is that we like certain foods and we gravitate to those foods/meals. I am going to have to be very diligent on making a variety of foods using what we have.

Part of my planning was to try a new recipe for each day for the next two weeks.  On Monday I made BBQ short ribs. It was very good and it will definitely be something we do again.  Tuesday was a Beef Enchilada, not a repeat, just not.  Wednesday was chicken parmesan casserole, this one will be a repeat.

I have been canning ALOT this week.  I always want to fill up all the empty jars so that we have plenty of food in the winter and this summer I am successful. I also filled the extra 5 cases of jars that I purchased from Walmart.  I added 10 quarts and 2 pints of beef stock, 18 pints of pears and 6 quarter pints, 2 half pints and 8 pints of pearsauce to the canning closet.

Not  bad for four days!