A Two-Week Dinner Plan for Six, and the Beans I Left at Home

The number I look at on a shelf tag is the small one in the corner, the price per ounce, printed in gray like the store hopes you'll miss it. The big number is for the shopper in a hurry. Lily has started saying "Mom, people are waiting" when I stop in the cereal aisle with my head tilted.

I'm writing this at the Bear Lake cabin, a little past the halfway point of our two weeks here, with a legal pad next to my laptop. The pad is the meal plan. Fourteen dinners, written in pencil before we left, and I want to show you how it works while I can still tell you which parts held up and which didn't.

What does a two-week meal plan for six people actually look like?

We're six on paper, and Emma's in Provo most weeks so the table at home is usually five, but I buy as if she might walk in on a Sunday, because some Sundays she does.

Fourteen dinners sounds like a lot until you take out the ones that decide themselves. Friday is pizza, which I make from a dough that costs about what a single store-bought crust does. Sunday is a roast. That's four dinners gone across two weeks, and ten left. I pick five and run each one twice.

This round's five:

Pasta with the beef-and-bean sauce I freeze in double batches
Chicken thighs on a sheet pan with rice and frozen broccoli
Bean and cheese burritos, with whatever is in the crisper rolled in
Egg fried rice, which uses up the rice from the thighs night
Baked potatoes with a pot of chili and a bowl of toppings

The sauce up here is the last two bags from the freezer, which rode up in the cooler packed in ice. If you read my post about how I feed six of us on about $150 a week, you've met the thighs and the sauce already, so I won't go through the prices again. This plan lands close to $150 a week for us, about $300 for the two, and I'd be making something up if I told you it was lower.

Rice feeds three of these dinners and beans feed three. The same onion bag and tray of eggs and block of cheese turn up all week, and that is most of why I'm not standing at the stove on a Wednesday wondering what I had in mind.

The beans I left on the counter at home

We pulled out of the driveway on the 25th with the Odyssey packed to the roof, and it was the Sunday after, in the cabin kitchen, that I went looking for the pinto beans. Five pounds of them, the big bag from the warehouse store. Sitting by the toaster at home, where I had set it so I wouldn't forget it.

Three of my five dinners needed beans and each one runs twice, at about three cans a dinner. I did that math on the drive into Garden City, a small town with a small grocery and prices to match. Canned pintos were ninety-nine cents, so I bought eighteen and paid about seventeen dollars and eighty cents. The bag on my counter cost maybe five. And I'd have had to soak them, which with Ben needing his nap in the middle of the afternoon is its own project.

So about thirteen dollars more for the same beans, less than we'd spend on a pizza night out, and I stood in the checkout line oddly fine about it. The plan I made two summers ago had no room in it for anything to go wrong and I'd dropped it by the second Thursday. This one survived the beans staying home.

What I buy in bulk and what I skip

A fifty-pound bag of rice is a good price and a bad idea if you have nowhere dry and cool to put it, so I only go big on what sits well and what we eat every week. That's rice, pasta, dried pintos and rolled oats, canned tomatoes and paste, frozen broccoli and peas and corn, flour, oil, peanut butter, salt, and eggs in the big flat since they keep a few weeks.

The things I stopped buying big are berries, because the third day is when they turn, plus fresh herbs and bagged salad. Yogurt in the giant tub too, which the kids swear is different from the small cups and then eat half of. I used to buy the family pack of ground beef and tell myself I'd freeze half, and I'd find the half in March. Now it's two pounds at a time.

While I was loading the cart I kept thinking of the manna.

And when they did mete it with an omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; they gathered every man according to his eating.

Exodus 16:18

I don't want to lean on it too hard, since the Israelites were fed by miracle and I'm fed by a membership card. In verse 20 some of them kept extra overnight and it bred worms and stank, which is also what happened to a pack of chicken I forgot about once.

Where the plan goes wrong

Snacks.

They aren't in the plan, and Lily and Caleb both find the pantry at three in the afternoon no matter what's in it. The other place is the night Caleb's game runs past eight and I'm in the rotisserie chicken line at the grocery with a hungry toddler on my hip. I budget for one of those a month now and don't feel bad about it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is $100 a week realistic for six people?

Not for me, here, and I won't tell you it is, because along the Wasatch Front I land around $150 with careful shopping. If your prices are lower or you have a garden bursting, you'll get nearer $100, and the five-dinner rotation is what gets you there.

Won't my family revolt over the same five dinners?

Mine tried it in February, and now I change the toppings, swap one dinner every other week, and call burritos "tacos" when I need a fresh start. Caleb has never once noticed that the sauce on pasta night is the same sauce.

Should I buy meat in bulk and freeze it?

Only if you have the freezer room and you'll really use it before it gets freezer burn, which for us is about three months. If you're not sure, buy one package and see.

What if I have dietary restrictions in the house?

Then I'd write your five dinners on a sheet of paper before you shop, and cross off anything that needs a specialty product, because that's where the budget goes. A friend of ours with a gluten-free daughter makes rice do what pasta does in my plan, and her receipt looks a lot like mine.

This week

Tonight I'm going to take the legal pad and count what's left in the cabin cooler against the second week's list, and tomorrow I'll cross off whatever we've eaten ahead of schedule. Then, before we leave on the 8th, I want the first week of home dinners written down too, because school starts on the 19th and I'd like my first grocery run on the 10th to be a boring one.

with love, Melissa