You know what amazes me? How out of all of the expenses that we have as adults, one of the only essential ones we have any control over is our grocery budget! We have control over all non-essential costs (or at least most), but when it comes to essential costs like bills, food and gas, we are pretty much out of luck. The grocery budget can make a huge impact on weekly costs…I know it does on ours.

So this week I decided to rejuvenate my efforts to reduce our grocery expenses while still keeping a focus on healthy eating. No easy task! That being said, I think I did a pretty good job this week! I did try a couple things this week I’ve never done before in my attempts to keep our budget lower and still healthy. I made homemade vegetable stock and cooked a dish using chicken drumsticks. I know, neither of these sound particularly adventurous, but I have never cooked either of these before. I have never even cooked chicken with any sort of bone in.

In my re-focusing on budget as well as health, I did some extra research when creating my menu this week. A few of the recipes came from this site and while I was originally unsure about how good recipes coming from a government resource would be, I was pleasantly surprised by how well these turned out! The Barley Jambalaya, Couscous with Peas and Onions and Quick Tuna Casserole all came from free cookbooks on this site. 🙂

So on to this week’s meal prep! Enjoy!

For the Molly’s Chicken, make sure to read the comments section. There are a lot of good ideas in there! As for the Saucy Green Beans, check out the recipe below if you have missed it in previous posts!

These are quite possibly the best smoothies I have ever made and sadly I can’t tell you how to make them. I kinda just threw things in, blended it for a long time (I really need a new blender) and voila! Very Berry Smoothies! I promise, I will try to record the ingredients and amounts next time!

For these, I used vegetable scrapes from previous meal preps that I had frozen with this in mind. I love that I could make all of this stock out of scrapes that would have otherwise just gone in the trash can!

That’s it for this week! What have you been cooking? Do you focus much on budget meals? I would love to hear some of your healthy budget-friendly meals!

Want to get started meal prepping yourself? Check out these posts for my top tips and my staple recipes!

Need some extra inspiration? Check out last week’s meal prep for other recipes and ideas!