It’s 5pm. You start to feel hungry and so does your family. What’s in the fridge that you can put together for a dinner–fast?
A lemon and sour cream? Awesome.
No.
“Let’s just go out,” -Hubby
Tempting, but do we really need the calories, or to spend the money?
No…
There’s no food, you’re kind of too tired to cook, too hungry to wait, and eating out is not the best option.
But then, I heard from Dave Ramsey
I am not being paid to tell you how great it it (darn!), but I’m still here telling you it’s great.
What is e-mealz, and why I love it–and why many families would, and why…no just kidding, no more whys:
E-mealz is a weekly food schedule with shopping list to make these meals for each of your seven meals. Your shopping list is broken up by category to group your items to purchase. (Meat, produce, etc)
Those of you who already shop based on a weekly menu, good for you, give yourself a lil’ medal. I seriously used to go to the grocery store and buy mostly at random, making decisions between different items based on what I now see as arbitrary qualifications, my mind slowly growing numb staring at food products, deciding whether to save a few cents here, pick all natural for this item, etc. This process would eat up my time in the store and when I would get home, there would be lots of groceries but only maybe one or two guaranteed and cohesive meals. What they hay? (Dave Ramsey is rolling his eyes at me)
The first week we did e-mealz I went into the store, bought everything on the list in order–just threw each item into the cart and was checked out in about 15 minutes. As I walked out the door…I felt elated. Yes, seriously I remember walking out of the store elated, sun shining on my face, mind not numb. I didn’t stare at two different kinds of black bean cans for 4 minutes, decipher prices between salad dressings, or any of the other menial tasks for non-specific meals.
I called Andrew on the way home, “Andrew!! I was in an out in no time! I have a lot of groceries! It was amazing.”
I got home, stocked my fridge and pantry. I felt kind of cool because I had purchased items that I had never even thought about before, I felt like I had branched out, and gotten to know my grocery store better. That night, at 5:30 I decided I should start thinking about dinner. I looked at the print out of the weeks meals, got out my ingredients for meal #1 and within 5 minutes had dinner cooking. I had every single ingredient–no need to try and concoct a good substitute for capers or onions or milk in a recipe, I actually had everything I needed. What the double hay?!
“This is really good,” said Andrew. “Oh really? I don’t even care if it’s good or not, that was so flippin’ easy to shop and cook.”-me. “This is good, ” -Andrew
Each meal plan is many hours of recipe and menu planning, price shopping, and recipe testing. It’s $15 for 3 months. So 5 dollars for a month on shopping and recipes, or 1.25 a week. Spending that $15 has saved us hundreds, more importantly saved time and stress. We may cancel after our three months, and then just recycle what we have, we’ll see! I even have a little notebooks and plastic sheets to put all my recipes in. “What Don’t you just save the PDF’s in a folder on your computer?” -Andrew. “Don’t break my stride,” -me.
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I am definitely going to check this out! Sounds like something we need to do! Wondering about cost though. Hmm
I am so super stoked you randomly found my blog because I am SO EXCITED about this. I am TERRIBLE at meal planning and this is just so stellar! Thanks for posting on it!!!