Mom Shares How She Makes Meals For Her Family of 5 For $100 Per Week

Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks – when you’re a busy parent it can sometimes feel like feeding your family is an endless chore. Kids sometimes always seem hungry for snacks and never hungry at meal times. Picky eaters and food allergies can make planning meals even more difficult. What’s a busy parents to do?

Mother and BuzzFeel contributor, Sydney Martin, is a wife and a mom to three young children, the oldest of which is just six years old. She knows first hand that it can be a lot of work to feed her busy and hungry family, but she had figured out some shortcuts to save time and money while keeping her family well-fed.

Martin shared that her family “has a severe peanut allergy,” so they don’t eat out very much, and takeout isn’t an option they trust. Instead, she cooks almost every single meal and snack they eat. This might sound like a lot of work, and it is, but Martin has some tips that can help all busy parents make prepping family meals a little bit quicker, easier and less expensive.

The first tip Martin shared, and it is a vital one, is that she plans out every single meal and snack for the entire week ahead of time. This step helps her know what she needs to buy and allows her to plan how much she needs of each item so she can plan to use leftovers for meals later in the week.

Martin starts by looking up recipes. She likes to try new recipes and improvise when it saves her time or money. She finds a lot of her recipes on Tasty.

After planning her recipes, she compares prices for the items she needs at different grocery stores. Then she either shops in person or uses a grocery delivery service to save time. Each week, her grocery total is only about $100.

Martin realizes that cooking every meal may not work for every family. She goes a little bit above and beyond by making bread from scratch and making her own granola bars. While not necessarily difficult, these tasks can be time consuming considering how busy you may be with other tasks, yet, if saving money is important, trying to fit these tasks in on the weekend, like Martin does, can be worthwhile.

Another tip Martin shared is that she always uses up leftovers. For example, she made a pan of sheet pan eggs for breakfast on Sunday morning, and on Monday morning, she cut the leftovers in pieces and put each piece on an English muffins to create breakfast sandwiches. She also made chicken thighs for a meal one day and used the leftover chicken for another meal later in the week.

One thing Martin takes into consideration before planning meals is what items she can get on sale that week. For example, she chose to use chicken thighs because they were on sale. If another meat had been on sale, she probably would have planned a meal around that instead.

A $100 weekly grocery budget may not be possible for every family. Martin realizes that her children are young and don’t eat as much as teenagers, for example, but using Martin’s tips can help us all save time and money when it comes to feeding ourselves and our family. These tips include planning meals around food that is on sale, using leftovers to create other meals later in the week, buying all the groceries for the entire week at once and prepping food ahead of time on the weekend.

Are you going to try Martin’s tips to save time and money preparing meals for your family? How much do you usually spend each week on groceries? What are your favorite ways to use leftovers?