A Week's Menu for $50! (included shopping list)

Usually, I don't include lunches in our menu plans because we eat most of our lunches at school or at work and we don't all eat the same things. See this post about packing lunches for examples of the lunches we pack. This weeks dinner menu below will cover most of our lunches for the week since all the recipes will have a generous amount of leftovers after our family of 5 eats dinner.

For breakfast, we eat a lot of cereal (purchased free or nearly free when Safeway has it on sale and I have coupons), oatmeal, pancakes, homemade bread, and homemade muffins. We'll limit this to only a few items for this week to keep the cost down.

This week's dinner menu is fairly kid friendly. My kids will eat most dinners, but these are some of their favorites.

Most items should be easily found at Walmart for this price. If not, pick a few items at Dollar Tree if needed. It does end up being a little over $50, but most of us will already have at least a few of the items on hand. For an entire week's groceries, starting completely from scratch with nothing in the pantry, $54 is pretty good!

Breakfasts
eggs
homemade bread
muffins
milk (from powdered)

Lunches
leftovers with carrot sticks, fruit, pretzels

Snacks
applesauce
pretzels
crackers/chips
bread
muffins
leftovers

Dinners
Sloppy Joes and peas, $4.70
Chicken -n- Dumplings, $5.50
Chili, $4.50
Homemade Pizza and applesauce, $6.75 (including 3 big cheese pizzas)
Scalloped Tuna/Potato casserole, vegetable, $2.75
Spaghetti, Corn, $4 (with 1/2 lb. ground beef, $3 without)
Brown beans, homemade bread, vegetables, $2.50


Shopping List, $
eggs, 2
flour, 2
powdered milk, 4
yeast, 4
salt, 1
pepper, 1
chili powder, .50
margarine, .60
baking powder, 1.10
large bag carrots, 2 (for carrot sticks and grate up the rest to add to the recipes, will also add any leftover veggies in the freezer if they mesh well with the recipes)
fresh fruit, 4
pretzels, 1
canned, fresh, or frozen veggies for 5 meals, 3 (my family doesn't eat a *ton* of these, so I usually make sure there are veggies included in the main dish as well)
2 packages chips/crackers, 2
applesauce, 2
2.5 lbs. ground beef, 5
1 lb. chicken thighs, 2
2 16 oz. cans tomato sauce, 1.50
2 cans spaghetti sauce, 2
spaghetti noodles, 1.25
peas, 1.50
onion, .25
cream of chicken soup, 1.25 (one large can)
4 pack refrigerated biscuits, 2
dried chili beans, .90
dried brown beans, .90
mozzarella cheese, $5
tuna, .75

Total, $54!!!

For more menus, visit Organizing Junkie.