My suggestion would be to itemize your receipts for a month or two.
Good plan, ender. I put it on the action plan.
Honestly feel that $300/month with the way we chose to eat is a pipe dream. It's a goal, but I feel a very far out of reach goal.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'd have a super hard time hitting $300/ month. Our kids are 9 and 3, and we come in more like $500 a month - and I've been eating/cooking frugally for years (it's where I put my focus), and it's a TON of work.
On meal planning - it can be super hard to manage that with a crazy life and little kids. My meal planning seems to have evolved into a more "general" thing:
First, I list what I got from the CSA on Thursday and list the "loss leader" veggies I bought elsewhere.
1. figure out what I'm eating for lunch (45 year old woman trying to lose 5 lbs) - so that means a lot of veggies and some protein.
- 2 cups of veggies a day (one lunch/ one snack)
- one fruit
- two proteins
2. Make a big batch of "something" for the family for the week: Beans and rice, chili, pasta, crockpot chicken, roasted chicken and veggies, soup, frittata, whatever
3. Prep other stuff for lunches for the family - wash and cut raw veggies and fruits, hard boil some eggs. Make sure I've got lunches covered for my husband (either sandwiches or leftovers)
4. Make sure I have enough veggies for dinner. Loosely plan dinners for 1/2 the week (too hard to plan further than that):
- Monday - chicken and a veg
- Tuesday - tacos and a veg (sometimes bean tacos, sometimes meat tacos)
- Wednesday - usually the leftovers from the weekend
- Thursday - honestly I wing it. Baked salmon and veg, or stir-fry, or sandwiches, or turkey/ veggie burgers
- Friday - pizza night
When I was really "on it" I'd make 2 big meals on the weekend - one for lunches for M-F, one for dinner Su-M-Tue. Then Wednesday was "crock pot day", so chicken in the crockpot, or lasagna, or pinto beans, or stew or... That was enough for dinner through Friday.
You have to play around with different kinds of meal plans, and recognize that what works now might not always work. I've gone from planning a month ahead, to a week in advance, to just winging it every night, to a plan where we ate specific things on specific nights, to planning two days ahead... These days I work late Monday and Wednesday, so Sunday and Tuesday nights I figure out what we are going to have that my husband can make. And if nothing is prepped, then I prep it before bed.
Just take small steps and you'll get there!